The Unorthodox Arts of War
by hundredacresky
Summary: The ancient, time-honoured learned art of seduction was an important rite of passage for kunoichi. This was all very good and well... Ino just really, really wished they could switch partners. Ino/Shikamaru
1. The Lottery

**A/N**: Following the advice of a reader, I decided to filter out my prose just a little to embark on another chaptered fic. Damn, this was hard. I swear this chapter was at least twice as long originally, but here we are. I BLED FOR THIS FOLKS. Not really. But flames hurt. Like a bitch. So sue me for caving.

Readers of _A Lighter Logic_, don't despair: I'm totally going to finish it, just in a little bit. And I don't intend to change my writing style for it, either. This was strictly for the sake of curiosity – and anyway, I'm finding I like my old way better (there's far less blood, sweat and tears). Enjoy!

**Disclaimer: **Naruto is Kishimoto Masashi's.

* * *

**1. The Lottery**

Today, there was going to be a meeting in Konoha.

The notice had been sent down through the lessening ranks of nin, spiraling out like a web away from its place of origin: Tsunade's slightly cluttered desk. Paper had never been a big thing for shinobi, for reasons of secrecy but Konoha certainly had natural resources enough to make use of it. So the notice – in blotchy ink on green paper – was posted on the bulletin board at that month's jounin rank meeting.

It had been a Tuesday; Ino remembered it as the worst day of her life. The announcement of their final kunoichi rite, the last art of seduction.

"I'm seeing things, right?" Ino was squinting at the two columns of adjacent names as though they'd disappear from the strength of her glare.

"Nope," replied Sakura, also staring at it despondently. "That's one hundred percent, bonafide, lime-green reality."

In all fairness, the two of them had a good reason for not really anticipating it until now - several of them actually. For starters, the… subject matter of the ritual meant that any older ninja had unsurprisingly little to say on the topic. Ino's father had suddenly developed a profound interest in sharpening his kunai. Sakura, with no nin-parents in residence, had asked Kakashi-sensei. Despite the fact that she was twenty-two, he smiled awkwardly under his mask and patted her on the head.

So, no help there.

Secondly, there was the fact that some had tried to rally the rite, saying that the modern-day kunoichi had plenty of other skills at her behest. The whole seduction card was hardly ever played, alternative methods of infiltration were far better, cleaner and quicker. Plus, they required only a little more planning and lot less birth control. Seeing as the current Hokage was a woman, there was some debate as to whether it would get the go-ahead for that year at all. But in some cruel twist of fate, it had. Ino trusted that there were a lot of good reasons for this, all of which went above and beyond the whole 'it's a tradition' thing. Tsunade would never have okayed something so blatantly sexist.

Knowing this didn't make any of it better, though.

"Bye Ino, Sakura-chan!" Naruto gave the two a jaunty wave as he walked through the door.

"Hey, Forehead," said Ino, gesturing at his orange-clad back. "Shouldn't we tell him about the meeting?"

Sakura crossed her arms over her chest. "Oh, don't worry – it'll just take him a second."

Ino shrugged. "Um… Oka–"

"Ah!" Naruto raced back. "What's that?" He asked, pointing at the sheet of paper.

Ino counted the days mentally; it would be three nights before the ritual drawing. She'd have to wring some information out of someone by that point, or else head into unknown waters. The likely question on everyone's lips would be: who was getting who?

"It's a ritual, Naruto," Sakura explained, totally deadpan. "A stupid, sexist ritual where the girls get to do horribly archaic things and the boys get to get rid of their untoward yearnings."

Naruto blinked largely. "Um… What?"

"So," Sakura went on, ignoring Naruto's questioning gaze. "That'll make it about three days, then. Eh, Ino?"

Ino hated to admit it, but she was pretty sure that they had had ample warning. They probably were alerted of this at the jounin inauguration, for god's sake. But the idea of it being so close and imminent… well, sort of sucked.

And here it was, their citrus-y green impending doom, scheduled neatly for next Friday. _Three days_, Ino thought. In the meantime, she'd have to do a little information gathering.

Naruto was still confused. "Wait – what's going on this Friday? What's the meeting about? Why are you guys acting so weird?"

"Three days," Sakura repeated glumly.

Ino swallowed hard. "I guess so."

* * *

"Wait, are you serious?"

Tenten nodded grimly. Ino had managed to get a hold of her the very next day – Tenten, being a year older than them, had participated in the event the year prior, and her review wasn't exactly scintillating.

"Yep," the older girl said, rolling her eyes. "You're so lucky that you're the rookie nine. I was part of the rookie three." At this, she gave Ino a meaningful look.

Neji _and _Lee. Ino felt sympathetic. "But I'm sure Tsunade was trying to get rid of – "

Tenten rolled her eyes. "Well, I guess _that_ didn't fall through, did it? Neji was participating, so obviously House Hyuuga would never let it slide. You know what that means, right?"

Ino felt her heart drop into her stomach. There went her possible petition. "Of course. Hinata."

"Oh, cheer up," Tenten soothed, sipping from her glass of water. "At least you get to draw names, right?"

Ino raised an eyebrow. "Something like that." Frankly, she had no idea.

"That means you could get anybody. Maybe even Sasuke."

It wasn't nearly as consoling as Tenten had intended; drop-dead gorgeous or not, Sasuke was still pretty much socially-retarded. A night with him would be only marginally less uncomfortable than getting someone else. Ino sighed. "But that also means I could get anyone else. Like Chouji, or Shikamaru, or Naruto. Oh god, I could get Naruto."

Tenten laughed, a light, silvery sound that probably had nothing to do with how she felt at this exact time last year. Ino glared daggers at her. "Oh don't worry, Ino! It might be fun." She gave her a hopeful smile.

Fun, right. "Well," toasted Ino, raising her glass. "Here's to randomly sleeping with two people I pretty much grew up with."

Tenten grinned evilly. "Cheers!"

* * *

The worst thing about time, Ino was convinced, was the crappy fact that it only moved forward.

Rounding the corner, Sakura greeted her friend with a depressing and uneasy smile. "So… I guess today's the day, huh?"

"Oh," said Ino, turning around. "It's just you."

Truthfully, there was no need for the reminder – Ino had spent the last night in an apprehensive, sleepless daze and the majority of the past three days making flowers wilt wherever she walked. Shikamaru and Chouji were on high red-alert for any sign of Ino and used all their shinobi cunning to evade her warpath. Only Sakura's similarly violent funk helped offset Ino's wrath. Still, the two of them hadn't seen each other much during the intervening days, trying to occupy their time with sundry chores about the village. Their conversations of late had a nasty tendency of curving to one very depressing and inevitable topic.

But there was no avoiding it. Friday had come like clockwork and well, here they were.

It's not like Ino didn't have her reservations - the likelihood of drawing anyone she actually _wanted_ to sleep with out of the drum was insanely low. The whole generation of participating jounin this year were people she had practically grown up with, meaning that whatever happened after Ino drew her pick heralded a very, _very_ awkward encounter.

"Say," said Sakura suddenly, worrying her bottom lip in thought. "Don't you wonder how this is going to work out? Like, are we just getting paired off and a choice few get to bang boots with the same sex?"

"Somehow," replied Ino. "I really don't think any part of 'old' and 'traditional' covers forced homosexuality."

Sakura squinted suspiciously at nothing in particular. "I _guess.._. But somehow this gives me a really bad feeling."

"Hey," Ino asked. "I don't suppose you spoke to Tsunade-sama about this at all?"

"Of course. She agreed that it was archaic and stupid and – most of all – totally sexist, but apparently the Hyuuga household is on her ass about it, so we'll have to grin and bear it."

Naturally. Ino didn't think Tsunade had a whole section of her heart partitioned off for sympathy. "Well," she said dryly. "I don't suppose she intentionally set out to kill the modern woman. Just to break her kneecaps and stuff."

She glanced down the hallway, counting doors as she went. The room was approaching, and with it, the dreaded meeting. "Ahem. So, Forehead." She turned towards Sakura with a mock pout. "Think you're going to cry when you pull Naruto from the hat?"

The girl gave her a look that would likely have killed lesser beings. "Oh no, no, no. Don't _even_, Ino-pig. If you jinx me, I'll never forgive you, so long as I live."

Hinata was rounding the corner just as Ino flashed her friend a terribly evil grin, her usually light Hyuuga pallor bordering on sheer unhealthiness. She looked beside herself with worry.

"Hinata," Sakura waved her over unenthusiastically. "Hinata, over here."

She gave a jump at her name, looking around her in a bewildered daze before spotting them. "Oh… hello. A-are you going to t-the..." She pointed in the direction of the meeting room.

Ino nodded grimly. "Yeah, we are. Want to come with?" Truthfully, the Hyuuga girl wasn't looking so well and her hands were trembling lightly. Ino didn't want her collapsing anywhere alone.

Sakura was in bitch-mode, and totally oblivious. "We're going in the same direction, Ino. It's not like she's going to walk behind us."

"Well, excuse me for breathing, Forehead. Anyway, Hinata. Anyone in there that you'd _like_ to pull out of the hat?"

Hinata turned a bright red. "N-no! Of course not. I m-mean… All our friends are very n-nice and everything, b-but this is just…"

Sakura gave a bitter laugh. She really was acting rather strange. "Is there something wrong with you?" Prompted Ino. "I mean, other than the usual?"

Hinata gave Ino a panicked look. Wrong move: now she was insanely curious.

"Oh hilarious, Ino." Sakura glanced at her watch testily. "Great, we're late. All the good ones are probably gone."

Ino blinked singly. "I don't think that'll be a problem, Sakura, seeing as this is a random draw."

"Oh, shut up."

Sakura had crossed both arms mulishly over her chest; Hinata's lip was quivering nervously. When in doubt, she thought, just act confident. "Oh, cheer up guys," she offered, feigning cheeriness. "Who knows? One of us could get Sasuke, right?"

Hinata smiled weakly. Sakura exhaled a little.

Ino grinned, tugging back the door. "Even though we all know that it's going to be me."

* * *

Shikamaru was cloud-gazing.

His morning had definitely been one for the dogs. First of all, his alarm clock read 8:30 when it rung that morning, meaning that he was despairingly late for his scheduled meeting with the Hokage. Leaping out of bed like a man possessed, he had attempted to dress and brush his teeth at the same time, before making a very bad judgment call and asking his mother why she hadn't woken him up earlier.

Big, _big_ mistake there. Shikamaru swore his ears would never stop ringing.

Next, there had been the meeting itself. Suffice to say Tsunade had never, ever been tolerant of tardiness and chewed him out thoroughly – _thoroughly_ as in bone-crushing-ass-whooping-grade thoroughly, inevitably professing to going 'easy on him' for not being a serial offender. _Easy _must have been the relative term, Shikamaru figured. He had no idea how Kakashi-sensei had any remaining limbs at this point.

And finally, to add insult to injury, he had just been assigned _another _A-class mission, departure date: that very night. This, in addition to the mission he had just returned from two days ago, would add up to fifteen days away from the village, enduring outdoor stealth missions and more blood than he wanted to encounter for the rest of the year. It seemed as though Tsunade merely wanted to run him to the ground for the fun of it. Shikamaru figured this wasn't an unreasonable stretch of her character.

A voice knocked him from his thoughts. "Hey! Shikamaru!"

Adding a ruined nap to his tally of fortunes. Would the good karma _ever_ end?

Shikamaru sat up slowly, glimpsing a black-orange blur race towards him. "Naruto," he greeted dully, stretching both arms languidly over his head for a joint-popping stretch. "What's _your_ hurry?"

Naruto slowed down, trotting up and down on the spot beside him. "The meeting... this morning – huff – but I think I might – huff – make it in time…" He jogged past him with a half wave.

Shikamaru glanced at his watch: the meeting had started fifteen minutes ago. How on earth Naruto ever passed academy math was wonder to him. But then again, he really wasn't one to talk.

"Ah! Wait a second!" Naruto jogged back to the bench.

Shikamaru sighed. "What is it?"

"Why aren't _you_ at the meeting yet? We're going to be late!"

"Naruto," said Shikamaru dryly. "We're _already _late. We've _been_ late for the past fifteen – wait, _sixteen_ – minutes. There's no way either of us will make it to that meeting on time now." He leaned back on the bench. "Better luck next time, okay?"

"Huh?" Naruto glanced at his watch, taking a second to read the time before switching to wide-eyed panic. "Oh no! There's no way I can miss this! If I don't get there fast enough, someone will pick Sakura-chan. It might even be Sasuke! See you later, Shikamaru!"

If he had the energy and the speed to keep up with his hyperactive friend, then Shikamaru might have felt compelled to enlighten him to the fact that it was a random draw, so being late wouldn't affect his chances of getting Sakura at all. But then his guilty conscience would feel compelled to tell Naruto about the subsequent broken ribs he'd get on the off chance that he did pull Sakura, and then back to the fact that as a random draw, there was still nothing Naruto could do about it. And that sort of circular logic just made Shikamaru tired.

Admittedly, the grim purpose of the said meeting did not rank particularly high on his list of exciting prospects. The whole thing seemed excessive, to say the least, and didn't really make much sense. There were plenty of situations involving the seduction and capture of men who participated in acts involving other males (among other things) and those weren't part of the roster. In fact, he was perfectly content to let whomever was unlucky enough to pull his name from that hat make the decision to find him or not. He'd play along accordingly. Besides, Shikamaru had a sneaking suspicion that the rite had only made an appearance this year to placate Hinata's family.

So, nothing lost in a little well-direct truancy. At least until his mission tonight, Shikamaru was determined to enjoy a few hours of undisturbed peace.

* * *

There was one thing wrong with bluffing: it never worked.

Hinata, first up to the plate, had descended the terraced seats looking faint with worry. Iruka had given her a sympathetic smile – his task of raffling off the group was equally awkward, given that he had practically raised all those in attendance.

Earlier in the class he had explained that each year had differing protocol for the ritual - given the uneven gender ratios and unpredictable number of successful teams. This year, the girls would draw two names, cycling them through the entire amount of males in the class. Ino felt distinctly queasy; Sakura was livid. She turned back towards her friend, mouthing a very obvious: '_like bicycles'_. Ino flashed her a weak smirk - the girl had a point.

But then again, many facets of shinobi-dom struck a harsh chord with her - murder by contract, brutal training hours, wilderness stealth missions and, least of all, the tacky headbands - so Ino supposed protesting this mid-level atrocity would be fairly pointless. Yeah, it sucked. It sucked _supremely_, and the next month would probably be rife with awkwardness beyond all compare, but she'd suck it up and move on. After Asuma's death, it had sort of been the team 10 modus operandi.

Hinata had reached into the tumbler, carefully choosing one of the topmost balls before handing it to Iruka.

"Ahem," he said, affecting an expression that suspiciously resembled pity. "You'll need to read it."

Hinata glanced over, eyes wide, and lost all colour.

Ino considered - Hinata took first place for Most Obvious Crush Ever, so Ino figured she would have probably fainted had she pulled someone she wanted from the drum. That made Naruto a definite out. There were the two on her team, but it was more likely that she'd be blushing madly for that. Who else? The curiosity was going to kill her. She'd have to ask Hinata the moment the meeting was through.

But there were still two more choices to be made.

"Yamanaka Ino," called Iruka, looking up at her from the podium. "Your turn."

Ino carefully smoothed down her skirt, standing up decisively. A sudden coldness flared in her stomach at the sound of her name, and the trek down the ten or so steps to the front felt like a long mile. Her mind flicked through the options: was there anyone she wouldn't mind receiving? Sasuke would be the obvious choice, though any experience with him would be slightly cold and very awkward. Shikamaru and Chouji were totally out, but she supposed it wouldn't be so bad with one member of the other teams. Kiba was sort of cute and marginally less hyperactive than Naruto. And Shino had the whole silent-type thing going on. Oh wait. The bugs. Ick.

"Ino, you have to choose a ball."

She blinked up at Iruka-sensei's face. Oh right. She finally moved from where she was standing aimlessly by the drum and reached inside, fumbling about for a deeper ball. _Kiba or Sasuke_, Ino cheered mentally. Her fingers closed around one near the bottom and she withdrew her hand slowly, feeling apprehension well up at the base of her throat. Ino swallowed. Opening her palm, she took a nervous look at the name.

Then everything went quiet in Ino's head.

"Wait." She turned to Iruka. "This must be a mistake. I'm going to redraw."

Iruka looked at her uneasily. "You don't get to redraw, Ino. At least not until the next round."

"Oh no, I understand that. It's just that _this_… this can't possibly count." She held out the ball. "See? There would be so many things wrong with this, I don't know enough words to cover them all."

Iruka frowned at her. "Um… sorry, Ino. Rules are rules." He bent to write the name down.

Ino freaked. "What?! No, Iruka-sensei…stop writing. There must be rules about _this_." She gestured at the ball like it had sprouted wings. "Can't you see that there are, like, special, extenuating circumstances involved here? Like my dignity and stuff?"

"Please don't make this awkward, Ino," Iruka soothed in a hushed voice.

"Like my _sanity_ and stuff?"

"No. I'm sorry. You can return to your seat now." Iruka had already written the name down – possibly because he was _evil_ – and Ino stared at it limply, her stomach having risen to the level of her tonsils. She gave a few half-hearted mouth flaps before her legs started to woodenly move underneath her, carrying her back to her seat.

This, clearly, was a joke. It had to be a joke. Any moment now, she'd wake up and it would be this very morning, and she'd realize that maybe she shouldn't have eaten that last piece of falafel because it sometimes gave her nightmares, especially when she was under a lot of stress, and, oh no, she was late for that stupid meeting today.

But it was sure taking a hell of while to end.

Returning to her seat, Ino was determined to wait out the remainder of the nightmare – bracing herself for the axe-murderers and the falls should have marked the end. And sat. And sat. Somewhere, in the periphery of her consciousness, she heard Sakura kick up a similar fuss about her assigned partner. Ino counted slow breaths to measure the time.

Nothing. Iruka finished up with a brief notice that he would verbally notify the students participating in this round. Ino counted forty breaths; fifty. The people around her began to thin and disperse. Sakura had come over to her seat.

"So," she offered, not noticing Ino's state of catatonia. "Guess who's going to drown herself in the shower tonight?" She held up her ball as Ino looked up glumly. It read _Uzumaki Naruto_ like some sort of blood-written curse.

Somehow, Ino could only feel mildly sympathetic. "Oh spare me the theatrics." She held up her own ball, where tiny black letters spelled _Nara Shikamaru_. "Because I'm clearly going to need a grave plot right. Next. To. Yours."

Hinata, however, did not need to propose a gruesome way to die. She glided over worriedly - still the same deathly shade of pale - and placed her ball solemnly on Ino's desk. The other two practically butt heads trying to read the name written there. It said: _Uchiha Sasuke_.

Ino gave a heavy gulp on Hinata's behalf. Clearly, the three had a terrible, terrible month ahead of them.

/


	2. The Mission

**A/N: **I know Shikaku isn't Ino's uncle. But seeing as he's a close family friend and not young enough to be called 'older brother', I figured this was appropriate. Also, frequency analysis is used to decipher texts coded with simple substitution ciphers (which wikipedia says is: a method of encryption by which units of plaintext are substituted with ciphertext according to a regular system).

Sorry folks, this chapter is a little heavier on the adventure than the romance. Bear with me!

* * *

**Chapter 2: The Mission**

* * *

Ino had a problem.

Somehow, her father had gotten wind of the ceremonial dates this year and – as if there wasn't already about a million things wrong with this whole week altogether – was pretty much beside himself with paternal worry. Ino had had quite enough of this. Following her mother's third failed attempt to bring her depressingly inebriated father back from the small bar two streets over, she had gone down there to drag him home herself.

"Daddy, I'm going to say this one more time. I? Am a big girl now. I can take care of myself. Now put down your glass and come with me. We're going home."

Her father gulped down his drink in stony silence.

"Daddy," Ino waited. "_Daddy._ Are you even listening to me?" She sighed loudly. "Look… _please_ don't worry about me. You've gone through the exact same thing and, look: you're perfectly fine, aren't you?"

Inoichi looked up, glassy-eyed, at his one and only daughter: light of his life, apple of his eye. Suddenly, the first four bottles of sake seemed sort of lonely. He gestured at the bartender. "Give me another one."

This was beyond hopeless. As long as Inoichi knew exactly what the ritual entailed – and it was a little late to curb this one; he had undergone the same thing himself, after all – paired with the unfortunate fact that _she_ would be to one to undergo it, the possibility that there would be any amount of alcohol in the world enough to console him was somewhat bleak.

Outside, the colder season had fallen in a seeming flash. Fireflies warily tapped against tree branches, causing them to shed their leaves. Ino sighed heavily. "Ugh, fine. Don't listen to me, then."

Ino's father closed his eyes. "Ino, sweetie, I know you're trying to make me feel better and I appreciate it. But right now, you're kind of the source of my woe."

This was ridiculous – Ino could've sworn her father was under the impression that _he _was the one undergoing the ritual. "Are you _serious?_ Oh, you're right. It's all so clear to me now. What with the whole doing my job properly and all, I'm a _real_ terror."

He father gave her a look for the sarcasm.

"Can't you just be happy that you… I don't know… Raised me well, or something?"

Shikaku gave a badly hidden cough from further down the bar.

"You know, I'm going to point out," said Ino scathingly, "that the three of you are currently drinking at _two in the afternoon_. Am I the only one who sees something very wrong here?"

That was plenty enough to elicit silence from the peanut gallery; her father's friends slunk guiltily in their seats.

Inoichi huffed. "I don't understand," he said despairingly. "Why has no one rallied this before?"

"Because everyone has to undergo it," answered Shikaku, leaning over and helping himself to another glass. "You did it, I did it. Ino has to, Chouji has to and probably so does my good-for-nothing son, if he bothered to show up for the raffling."

Ino realized she was gripping her shuriken holster so hard her fingertips were going numb, and became politely fascinated with the intriguing trajectories of passing fireflies outside the window.

Chouza gave her a sympathetic smile. "I'm sorry you have to do this, Ino," – here, Inoichi gave a heavy sob in her stead – "the whole thing seems really unfair to girls."

Inoichi gave him a look that probably aimed to convey something along the lines of: _you could never, for a thousand years, fathom the immense intricacies of having a daughter and the immense emotional hurdles I am having to overcome as a result of this, not to mention the relative amount of physical damage undergone from alcohol therapy which has also drained the bank account and angered the wife_. This, predictably, shut Chouza right up.

Ino figured she needed to invoke some reality here. "Look, Daddy, it's nothing you need to worry about. Go home. Despite the fact that I totally appreciate your tears on my behalf, I'll be perfectly fine." Well, maybe _perfectly _was a bit too strong. More like 'maybe'. Or 'possibly'. If she left Konoha tomorrow and never returned.

"Hey," her father said, revelation lightening his voice. "Have you thought of talking to Tsunade-sama? She might be able to do something, you know. Perhaps give you an exemption. Or maybe scrap the whole thing altogether!"

Shikaku and Chouza swapped dubious glances further down the barstool.

Inoichi ignored them. "Maybe if you asked really, really, _really_ nicely? People can't say no to a good, old-fashioned heartfelt appeal."

"Well, you were told wrong," Ino explained tiredly, rubbing her temple with one hand. She herself had asked Sakura the same question that very morning – profoundly baffled as to why Tsunade-sama intended on giving such a blatantly sexist ritual the get-go in the first place. Sakura explained that the Hyuuga household had predictably gotten wind of the ceremonial dates that year and were backing it at full force. Ino despaired; hadn't House Hyuuga ever heard of breaking the mold? Of course, being the oldest and most traditional family in Konoha – with the added monopoly of being the only sprawling example of an Konohan ocular kekkei genkai – she supposed they saw it as some god-given task to uphold the rites most – surprise, surprise – old and traditional.

Of course, it was a little more than surprising that they had so cleanly acquiesced to Hinata's round-one assigned partner – not only was Sasuke the infamous one-time Konoha defector, he would also sully the bloodline with his rivalling trait. But then again, maybe Hinata just hadn't told them. Considering the hell that would likely break loose, Ino couldn't say she blamed her.

And so, with a major house pressing for the fulfillment of the ritual, Tsunade probably wouldn't be doling out exemptions. If Ino wanted an out, it wasn't going to happen this way. She'd have to think of something else.

She rubbed her neck thoughtfully. Somewhere in the space of Ino's ruminations, the number of sake bottles had increased to an alarming six. This had gone on long enough.

"Okay, okay. You know what? I'll be perfectly fine, so don't worry yourself over this." She steadied her features in an attempt to look convincing. "Right now, I have somewhere I've got to be, so I'll see you three later. Just… promise me you'll go home soon, alright? And I never want to see _any_ of you drinking at two in the afternoon, so long as I live."

The three dutifully avoided her gaze.

Ino tapped a foot. "_Understand?_"

Chouza gave her a guilty smile. "Of course… who could break a promise like that?"

"That's what I like to hear."

Taking her leave, Ino breezed past them before Shikaku suddenly spoke up. "Hey," he asked – and somewhere up there, the fates were chuckling maliciously – "you didn't tell us who you pulled from the raffle."

Oh, ho, ho. The _irony_. This was ridiculous – kind of like a hopped-up version of those crazy, prime-time hidden camera prank shows.

"You know," replied Ino, sounding a little constipated. "I think this should stay strictly need-to-know." She meaningfully indicated her father with a tilt of her head. "Don't you agree, Uncle Shikaku?"

Chouza glared daggers at his friend, elbowing him in the gut and jerking his head towards the other end of the bar, where Ino's father looked like he was trying to drown himself in a two-ounce sake cup or else by the sheer volume of his tears. Shikaku backed off with an embarrassed look. "Oh, right, right. Sorry."

But Ino, ever the opportunist, was already hurrying away.

* * *

The day was already fading by the time the cipher was broken – filaments of dusty sienna light yanked backwards through heavy cumulus like a sewn thread in reverse, bullied beneath the linear horizon by the encroaching, bruise-coloured night.

The target had dropped the coded text in his haste to get away: it tumbled from his rucksack as he spun for escape, limbs stretching, joints popping long enough, light enough but not nearly fast enough before the tendrils of dark shadow tightened around his ankles, holding him fast.

The poor guy never had a chance.

"Jesus," noted Shikamaru with disdain. "Messy enough there?"

His partner had crouched low beside the body, invoking the appropriate cleanup jutsu. From the look of it, there would simply be nothing to do with all that blood. "What? That's the fun part, man. Being a ninja wouldn't be worth it without the garotting."

"Yeah, but that just reached a new level of gruesome. You didn't need to saw his head off."

In return, Ryo just rolled his eyes as though his face wasn't totally streaked with blood like some movie-grade serial killer – complete with a beheaded corpse by his side. "Fine, fine. Go ahead and spoil my fun. But I guess the blood's going to be a problem, huh?"

Shikamaru looked up at the fading light; the fireflies had come out and were tracing errant paths through the twilight. A hint of red tinged the sky. "No. Just leave it. Looks like we're going to have some rain soon, anyway." Up in the surrounding trees, two more members of the squad crouched among the leafy branches, ready to leap for support if required. Their services hadn't been needed. "You two! That was the last one; we'll scour his stuff tonight and make for the meeting point tomorrow. Go on ahead without us."

Ryo was wiping his kunai off on a leaf just as the rain started falling. "Damn," he said, looking up with a grimace. "Did I ever tell you that I _hate_ it when you're right, you son of a bitch?"

But Shikamaru had already turned away, his foot stubbing the dropped piece of intelligence. It gave a wet crackle as he bent to pick it up.

"Awesome," said Ryo, peeking over his shoulder. "With my beauty and your brains, deciphering this'll be a snap, right?"

Shikamaru sighed heavily. It was going to be a long, long night.

* * *

"So, my life is over," Sakura muttered darkly over the remains of her lunch. She was apparently in the process of molesting her uneaten salad, pushing it back and forth on her plate so many times, it resembled a platter of green lumps and smears. Ino eyed it distastefully.

"Sakura, are you going to eat that or do you want to fondle it some more?"

Sakura dropped her fork with a clang. "I can't eat a bite. My life is over."

Ino rolled her eyes. "Then you should have thought of this _before_ you asked me to meet you for lunch."

Sakura gave her a withering look. "Will you stop being such a _bitch_?"

"Excuse me?" Ino must not have been hearing things correctly. _She_ wasn't the one walking around with a rain-cloud perpetually over her head. "What is _wrong_ with you these days?"

"Girls," Tenten interjected, newly arrived and sliding out a seat for herself. "Let's play nicely, alright?" She glanced at Sakura's… meal. "Oh, you guys ordered without me. Well, I'm not that hungry. How goes the big suck?"

"Sucky," pouted Sakura.

Tenten nodded with wide-eyed comprehension. "As I've heard these things go."

In Ino's opinion, Sakura was just being a drama queen. She rolled her eyes.

The tension in the air clearly had little to do with the impending rainy season. "Oh lighten up, girls," she grinned cheerily, "it sucked for me, too. I mean, the thought is kind of, you know… _appalling_. Like, your team-mates are pretty much family."

Both girls swivelled their heads towards her simultaneously. "Um… same boat here," Ino prompted cattily. You know, just in case Tenten had forgotten or something.

Across the table, this cracked a slightly more conscious response from Sakura who, refocusing her wrath on Ino, gave her a look that would have likely withered flowers. "Oh that's perfectly easy for you to say. It's all hypothetical, right? I mean, it's not like Shikamaru deigned to show up at the raffling of doom anyway, so do you even _have_ a problem right now?"

Ino looked up at her. "What are you talking about?"

"Today I was going through the assignment roster for Shishou and saw that he just got scheduled for an A-rank mission just yesterday. He left last night. There's no way Iruka-sensei caught up with him before then—"

Ino's heart skipped a beat. "Wait a sec," she said. "Wait, wait, wait, wait… go back."

Sakura rolled her eyes. "He's gone. He doesn't know."

"So…he's _gone_ gone? Not in Konoha? Like, as in 'not here'?"

"I really don't see any other way I could have meant that," Sakura retorted bitterly.

Ino felt sweet, sweet elation well up in her throat. This? Was _fabulous_. With Shikamaru away, she wouldn't have to undergo the ritual for the time being. And if she was really, _really_ lucky, then he might not get back until well after the next raffle entirely. From where she was standing, only two things could possibly go wrong: 1) that Shikamaru returned before the next reassignment – the date of which had yet to be announced or 2) that she pulled Chouji in the next draw. Oh well, it was best not to think of these things. The fates were clearly throwing her a bone here, and Ino was anything if not ungrateful.

"Ugh. My life is over," Sakura groaned, just in case no one had heard her the first dozen times. Being the good friend she was, Ino tried to keep her exploding glee to a minimum. It wasn't working.

"Shishou is, like, crushing my will to live here." Sakura put her face down on the table, prostrate with despair. "I can't believe I have to do this.

"Hmm…Well there's always having you cloned or something, don't you think? Maybe we could assassinate Naruto? The old cyanide in the ramen trick?" Ino winked at Sakura, who gave her a grimace of profound unamusement.

"Hmm… would you like to brag about your good luck some more or am I going to have to rip you a new one?" Ino stuck her tongue at her. Sakura could be so _violent_ sometimes.

Tenten was worrying her bottom lip thoughtfully. "You haven't told Takuya yet, have you?"

Ino looked up. In the wake of Sasuke's return to Konoha, he was already old news. The once enamored girls of the rookie nine had found solace in the plethora of non-shinobi boys about the village – team-mates were an unspoken off-limits, plus there was something intrinsically awesome about being able to kick your boyfriend's ass by default. Takuya, a shopboy from the place two doors down from the Yamanaka Flower Shop, was Sakura's recent on-again, off-again boyfriend. Despite the fact that he possessed the mental capacities of lesser species of plants, Ino supposed he was marginally better than the losers her friend usually dated. Sakura just had really bad luck with men… Look at how the whole Sasuke thing turned out.

Finally, her villainous funk was making some sense.

"Come on," balked Ino incredulously. "You're seriously not going to _tell_ him, are you?"

Sakura rolled her eyes. "Oh, I don't know Ino. I have this sneaking suspicion that the whole 'sleeping with other people' thing might not go down so well."

"It's work," Ino stated firmly. "It's not something he can understand."

"She's right, you know," nodded Tenten, "it's really none of his business."

Sakura didn't look particularly mollified, fingering her napkin distractedly. "Yeah, I guess."

Out of the corner of her vision, Ino spotted Naruto innocently rounding the street corner, a bundle of something-or-other under one arm. Someone spotted him and stopped to chat, the two laughing over some unheard something, until Naruto caught sight of Ino and subsequently, the back of Sakura's head. He stopped short, adopted a look of profound panic, while contemplating the safest course of action. His companion was waving a hand in front of his face in an effort of regain his attention, but to no avail. Naruto finally opted for an abrupt about-face before swiftly tiptoeing away with painful caution.

Ino couldn't say she blamed him – right now, she wouldn't put Sakura past a little DIY castration.

"What are you looking at?" asked the girl in question, following Ino's gaze and looking over her shoulder.

By which point Naruto was long, long gone, leaving his companion in a confused daze. Let it not be said that ninja were masters of stealth for nothing. "Oh, nothing," replied Ino innocently.

"Sakura," Tenten asked. "When did you say Shikamaru was coming back?"

The girl shrugged. "I don't know. It was an A-rank mission, so… a week, maybe? Two?"

"Then I guess you've got to start planning for the long-term, right Ino?" Tenten giggled.

She hated to admit it, but Ino knew Tenten had a point. She had no idea when the second draw would be held, or how long they'd have to finish the rite and though it seemed badly structured to her, personally, she supposed Tsunade had bigger and better things to deal with. In all actuality, a direct disobeyance of the rite might even pass entirely under the radar. But Konoha had bred better nin than that and this would be monitored on more than just faith and the honour system. Ridiculous as it was, it was still a test of their shinobi mettle, on the honor of their wills of fire. Unfathomable or not, Ino would never be so crass as to lie when it came to duty.

So _fine_. But let it be known that there was nothing dishonourable about crossing one's fingers. "Oh… you know. I'll just wait and see what happens, right?" Good faith had always done her right. Failing that, there _was_ that patch of field where she had found two four-leaf clovers last year…

Just then, Kiba trotted up along the café fence, interrupting Ino's thoughts. "Yo, Ino," he called. "You're wanted."

Which could only mean one thing. When Tsunade called, nobody failed to answer.

Sakura was outraged. "_No._ NO. First, your partner's out of town and now a mission? What, did you like win the lottery and forget to tell me about it? Make a deal with the devil?"

Ino rolled her eyes. "Sakura, you're _already _on a mission, remember?"

Sakura gave a depressed sigh. She hated genin team training. "But that doesn't count."

"Well, maybe it would if you _passed_ a team for once." Ino sighed. "But I guess you _are _Kakashi-sensei's pupil. You know what they say: like teacher, like stude—"

"Oh God," interjected Tenten, clearly thinking of Gai. "_Don't_ finish that sentence. _Please._"

Ino stood up. In the time of their little segue, Kiba had disappeared. "Anyway," she offered cheerily. "You'll just have to suck it up, Forehead. Some people just live in the light. You know what they say about jealousy making Jack a dull boy."

Sakura pressed a weary hand to her face. "You're quoting that wrong," she said tiredly, but Ino was already gone.

* * *

Ino knew Tsunade's office would be the usual kind of disorganized – a weird amalgamation of trite but endearing decorating attempts (courtesy of the late Third) plus Tsunade's own line of day-to-day souvenirs (here, an overturned sake cup, poker chips strewn about, one bent corner of an ace of spades protruding from the lumpy carpet) – but what she _hadn't_ been expecting was to find the room half-plunged into darkness, curtains drawn haphazardly against the sunlight and the moaning Hokage prostrate on her desk.

"Er… Tsunade-sama? Are you alright?"

Tsunade didn't even grace this with a look. "Oh, it's you. Here," she gestured at the manila folder balanced on her desk. "There are the mission details. You leave… I don't know. Tomorrow or something. It's all in there."

Ino glanced at the teetering stack of papers dubiously. The mission folder looked a little heftier than she would've liked. She picked it up, gently drumming her fingers against the cover. "So… how was your night?"

From the other side of the darkened room, Tsunade finally looked up, raising an eyebrow at her. Despite the low lighting, Ino could see that both eyes were puffy and bloodshot, rheumy with cold. With the seasonal flu going around, it looked like Ino wasn't the only one with a crappy weekend behind her.

"Oh, I don't know. I mean, beside the swelling and the fact that I feel like I keep swallowing around a ball of steel wool, it's been _stellar_. Any more questions or can I start the briefing now?"

Konoha's Hokage sometimes made it very hard to feel sorry for her.

Tsunade flipped open a corresponding folder, clearing off the base of a table lamp before she flicked it on. She grimaced at the light. "Ahem. Anyway. So, your departure date's tomorrow. The client will be waiting for you about twenty-seven paces southwest from the Takigakure's Southern Border. He'll be distinguishable by his briefcase and – I quote – its _unusual color_."

Ino raised an eyebrow. Other than the sketchy specifics, this mission seemed to be fairly straightforward – C-rank and intended for her current four-man genin training cell. They would chaperone the client from Takigakure to his next job (the details of which Ino was not made privy to), offering him fairly low-level security on the way.

"On the second day, you'll rendezvous with a backup squad—"

Ino looked up. "What? There's a backup squad?" Maybe she hadn't read the mission ranking correctly? Ino flipped a few pages back to make sure. As far as she knew, C-class missions did not require backup squads. C-class missions required rain-boots, sanitizing wipes and adderall for one third of her hyperactive team.

Tsunade looked at her expectantly.

Ino coughed, reiterating for the sake of her own personal safety. "Uh… I mean: did you intend to send out other shinobi as well, Hokage-sama?"

The Hokage rolled her eyes largely at her subordinate's lack of a decent attention span. "Yes, Ino. Was there anything else you weren't paying attention to that you would like me to repeat again?"

"Oh, no," Ino said quickly, hoping she wouldn't get on the wrong side of her cold-ridden superior today. "I was just… testing your enunciation. You know what they about public speaking. You don't use it, you lose it, right?" And maybe one day, Ino would be able to _not_ lie like an awkward fourteen-year-old boy. She could only hope.

"Right," Tsunade said knowingly, but recommenced her briefing. "_Your_ mission is straightforward enough. Plenty to keep the little firecracker on your team engrossed for the next few days." Ino sighed inwardly – she'd call Rikimaru a lot of things, but _firecracker _wasn't one of them. Had the little idiot found some way to piss of the Hokage when he wasn't under Ino's supervision? Or even worse – had this potentially happened when he _had_ been? Tsunade, oblivious to Ino's clearly deep internal struggle, went on. "But there are two missions."

Ino visually summarized the loose page. "We're tailing both the client and his assailants."

"Exactly," Tsunade nodded approvingly. "The client is a free-lance cartographer of sorts, though he's originally from the Wind Country. Turns out he was commissioned to map out the entries to the Hidden Waterfall – which just went top secret, as you well know – and they're looking to wipe his memory the only permanent way." Despite the macabre nature of the subject, Tsunade hurried through it summarily. "Clearly, the disposal squad is currently far too high level for one civilian to take on."

Ino understood. The client would make the most of his hired help by striking out his problem at the source – most nin disposal squads were moderately well-trained and would likely find him anywhere, despite his free-lance status. Off the squad and you'd not only get rid of the problem for the time-being, you wouldn't be mistaken for any old target. Konoha would be charge of disposing the disposers, financed by their mapmaker friend, of course.

Ino looked up. "And the next set of nin they send out?"

Tsunade nonchalantly rested her head against her hand. "Not our problem, is it?" No, of course not. Unless the client cared to make it worth their while. It was funny how money always tied into these things. "You'll meet a representative from the backup team here," Tsunade indicated a small river south of the village. "If they tell you they need more time, make some. But I'm capping this all off at about two weeks – try not to take any longer than that because we'll need you back here." Tsunade looked as though something had just occurred to her. "Plus, you've got that ritual to complete, don't you?"

Ino couldn't say anything around the sudden lump in her throat.

The Hokage cast her eyes back to the folder while Ino swallowed heavily. "Anyway… the list of provisions is here, so I really don't need to go over all this again, do I? Geez, Shizune's handwriting is _awful_… Hmm… Water, food, tent, camouflage, kunai – _kunai_? No _really_. Of all the stupid –" She flung open the door harshly, just as Shizune happened to pass by. "_Thank you, _Captain Obvious. I mean… kunai on a mission? _Such_ brilliance"

Her assistant proceeded to slam the door in her face, looking very unamused.

The rest of the Hokage's words blurred into a muddy lecture as Ino reiterated the key mission points and contemplated where this all left her. Shikamaru could return from his cryptic task any day now, bringing Ino back to a frantic square one. Then, in the next little while, a second raffle would be held, at which point she was pretty sure she wouldn't luck out again. Ino sighed inwardly, looking down at her paper.

This mission was her ticket to a fortnight away from town. Two weeks, Ino thought, biting her lip. At least she could put this stupid thing on hold for the time-being.

* * *

Contrary to popular belief, Shikamaru was pretty sure that isolation and lack of other distractions really didn't make the whole decipherment process any easier than it would've been, say, back in Konoha. In fact, it sort of had the entirely opposite effect altogether, making the buzzing of mosquitoes, bad candlelight and Daisuke, Okabe and Ryo's muffled snores absolutely megaphone-magnified in the (not so) cosy tininess of their makeshift tent.

"For God's sakes, turn off the fucking light," groaned Ryo vehemently from beside him, totally oblivious to his imminent death by pillow-related asphyxiation. Shikamaru didn't even grace his comment with a look.

He had been up half the night decrypting the cipher with uncharacteristic dedication – there was something awfully awry here and Shikamaru wouldn't be able to relax until he could shirk off that feeling with finality. Unreasonable suspicion, he decided, was a really crappy thing altogether. Paired with the soaked underwear and socks, his discomfort had reached an all-new low.

The basic cryptanalytic mechanisms had already been run through in the earlier hours of that night – frequency analysis had proved fruitless, leaving Shikamaru to believe that the text hadn't been encrypted with a mere substitution cipher – made even harder by the fact that it was composed of foreign characters. It would be slightly more trying than they had originally thought. A foreign alphabet? Syllabilic or phonetic? Semagrams? At this point, the rest of the team had opted to hit the sack, ready to embark for the rendezvous point tomorrow.

"You? Not sleeping?" Ryo held a hand against his forehead. Shikamaru swiped it away. "What, are you dying or something?"

He ignored him. Sure, Shikamaru was tired. He was so tired, but there was something about the cipher that was niggling at him. A jumbled set of symbols that occurred about five times throughout the text, underlined for emphasis. Shikamaru figured that the repeated set of symbols near the middle of the word meant something. An extended syllable, maybe…

The break was found at four-thirty that morning. He wrote the name down in the cluttered margin in heavy black letters. It read: Hyuuga.

Comprehension flooded through the symbols in a heady tidal wave, words crashing into logic and a plan was unfolding before his eyes. "Oh my god," Shikamaru began solemnly, squinting in the still candlelight.

— The _perfectly still _candlelight.

Wait. He turned around. "Ryo? Okabe?" _Why_ had the snoring stopped? "Daisuke!"

The tent was empty, nothing around but the dim glow of the candle by which he had picked apart the perplexing script. The flame gave one twitch, two.

Realization dawned on Shikamaru like a ton of bricks. He leapt out of the tent just as the figure shot forward; a heady swoosh from a moving body, the crinkle of desiccated leaves disturbed on the ground and the jittery light of a struggling flame.

Then, the candle flickered out, plunging the night into a blind and bitter darkness.

/


	3. The Client

Dawn.

The night prior, it had been decided that the members of team four would meet near the great gates of Konoha at the ungodly hour of 6AM. This was, in and of itself, not exactly the problem – somewhere in the past few years of hard missions, Ino had learned to keep her ritualistic morning bitching and groaning to a minimum. A few hours less of sleep, she had learned the hard way, was far, _far_ more preferable to the sheer hell any terrain trip promised to be at night. Puffy faced or not.

No, it was more the fact that Ino had spent the past night dedicating an appalling amount of her energies to ignoring the tiny lottery ball not-so-artfully stashed in her shirt drawer (she had initially stuffed it in her underwear drawer, but there were just too many things wrong about that). For such a tiny ball, it was sure doing a mighty wonderful job of filling up every available inch of her bedroom, presence-wise.

But back to the mission. So, according to contract plans, Team 4 would make their way to a secluded little waterfall located in some patch of backwater forest, meet their mysterious client, escort him to parts unknown and then return home to collect their much-deserved pay. Simple. But all missions sounded simple on paper.

Which never helped an already-soured mood. Ino blinked away the sleep from her eyes and took a deep breath. Know your terrain, said Iruka's old lessons. Shinobi must be one with their surroundings.

Oh, she knew the terrain, alright: the land surrounding the Leaf was what all the guidebooks euphemistically called "unnaturally dense". Which _really_ meant that the first few hours of their trek would be spent doing some brutal bush-whacking through thick, (hopefully) uninhabited and (definitely) unfriendly underbrush; staving off the man-eating mosquitoes and keeping vigilant for more shinobi-esque threats. Followed by a charming six miles of sheer swampland and mountains. Fabulous.

Luckily, the pre-set meeting date left plenty of time to make the journey and Ino had snuck in a few hours here and there for various (and necessary) breaks throughout. So, seventeen hours, she had posited. A little night travel, but they'd be there the next day.

"_What? _A rest _again?_ This is the second one today! You're lucky we covered any ground at all, Sensei, at your pace!"

And _Rikimaru _was lucky that the contract she had signed at beginning of this whole teaching stint explicitly forbade her to maim, harm, rearrange or remove any part of her students whatsoever. With her bare hands, that is. Ino glanced mildly around her for a decently sized stick.

"She's ignoring you, Riki," commented the dark-haired girl beside him. "Because you obviously can't count, can you? Seventeen hours. We're still on the first nine."

He flushed an angry red. "No, I'm just saying that we're never getting anywhere at this rate. It'll take us a bajillion years! I know Sensei's old, but she's not _that_ old yet."

"Rikimaru," Ino explained through gritted teeth at the 'old' comment. "I am telling you this only one. More. Time. The seventeen hour arrival estimate is a proven fact, not an insult to your track and field skills. So shut up."

"But that's crazy!" He continued, totally unfazed. "We _always_ end up making better time than the arrival estimates, Sensei! Come on, let's just skip the break."

Clearly, nothing got through to this kid. He was going to drive her to the drink one day. "Hey, Rikimaru," Ino said, violently wringing out her rain-wet ponytail in lieu of the kid's skinny little neck. "Let's you and I make a deal. How about: you don't say another word for the rest of our trek and I don't hang you from the next high tree we see?"

This, predictably, shut him up for the next forty-five minutes.

Because she was nothing if not a fair girl, Ino had bypassed the break during the silent spell as a sort of an unsaid reward for Rikimaru, taking solace instead in the simple things along the way: the serene chirping of crickets, the heady scent of florals, the dark-colored clouds lingering ominously overhead.

The dark-colored— Wait a second.

"Alright troops," she stated, leaping lightly off her tree branch. "Break time."

Beside her, there was a damp thump as one of her students alighted from her perch and landed beside her. Hatsumi straightened, readjusted the heavy pack gracing her shoulders and looked up at the treetops expectantly. Next came Yuu, his pack even heavier with his usual toolkit and their accompanying silencers; droplets of rain already speckling the dark lenses on his goggles. He flicked up the shaded lenses and glanced up, somewhat nervously, at the dark treetops.

Where the final member of their squadron stared stubbornly back at them, still perched on his branch. "Nuh-uh. Not yet. I can see the mountains from here," he bluffed, squinting obviously at the darkened horizon. "We'll rest when we get there."

"I'm not going to weather another sudden rainstorm if I don't have to, Rikimaru," Ino explained through gritted teeth. "Get your ass off that branch right _now_."

Hatsumi narrowed her light eyes at him threateningly; he met the stare, but was still utterly unswayed. If anything, he looked even more obstinate than before. Try as she might, Ino couldn't ever recall Team 10 being this bad. She should have taken that transfer to the Konoha prison instead – heaven knew it would be a hell of lot less taxing on her mental health.

"Rikimaru," she warned, tapping one foot impatiently and hoping she was exuding as much thunder and lightning as she hoped the gods would smite him with in his stupid little tree. "Last. Call."

"Come on, Riki," pled Yuu, a low note of somewhat desperate warning in his tone. "Let's take a break while we still can. We'll travel non-stop when we meet up with our target."

This had clearly gone on long enough. Without another word, Ino reached into her damp rucksack with a frightening sort of calm as the other three watched curiously. First was the glove. Ino pulled it snugly over her right hand, painstakingly making the appropriate adjustments around each finger.

Hatsumi caught on first; at the glint in her light eyes and her devious grin, Yuu gave a nervous start. "Ino-sensei…"

Ignoring him, Ino turned and reached back into her bag. Above them, Rikimaru craned his neck to watch her, both feet still stubbornly planted on the wet branch nevertheless. Until she withdrew a bow and arrow, calmly assembling them with great and evil pleasure.

A thud. Rikimaru had practically leapt from his tree. "Fine, fine! I'm down, see? There's no need for cold-blooded murder."

Point made, Ino rolled her eyes and did a purposeful about-face, stalking towards the refreshment hut with a vengeance as the clouds rumbled darkly overhead, heavy with the prospect of rain. Hatsumi gave a gleeful chuckle at Rikimaru's panicked expression, her light eyes glinting evilly in the half-light before trotting off after their teacher. Behind her, Yuu followed slightly more sedately, not before tossing a few sympathetic glances back at his teammate.

The rain began falling when they were barely twenty feet from the hut, ruining Ino's ambitious plans at avoiding soakage.

Murder, huh? With students like these, the notion was kind of inevitable.

* * *

/

* * *

"Sensei. Sensei!"

Ino cracked open an eye in the direction of the voice. It was Yuu, softly shaking her arm. Somewhere in the distance, she could hear the violent pattering of rain. "Should we order more tea?"

It had been the humid air coupled with the morning's four or five missed hours of sleep that lulled Ino into a very brief catnap in her corner of the table.

The waiter arrived then, with plates and plates of sticky-looking, multi-colored confections. You take one twenty minute tabletop nap and the little brats totally stomp all over your calorie-Nazi regime. It figured. "I'll take a coffee, thanks. Black."

"Sensei," Yuu asked her. "You didn't tell us who we're meeting, or why. What do we know about our client?"

Rikimaru rolled his eyes and scoffed around the four sugary balls crammed into his mouth. "Who _cares? _He's a client, which means we get paid, which means we get a C-rank in our portfolios."

"Idiot," answered Hatsumi from across the table. "And how exactly are you going to find someone you know nothing about?"

He shot her a death-glare. "I dunno. Recon isn't really my thing. Aren't _you_ the one with the creepy x-ray vision?"

A cool smirk from the girl as she activated the Byakugan. "And aren't those giraffes on your underpants?"

"Hey, let's keep it clean," Ino cut in dully, examining her nails. The x-ray vision comment wasn't wholly untrue, after all. Hatsumi was the latest in the line of Hyuuga heirs, second only to Hanabi after Hinata had officially stepped down and they began accepting Branch children for the position (Neji had stoically refused, stating that his place remained forever as a pillar for the main house, or something that sounded equally er... honorable). Hatsumi's reign (if it ever came) would likely a temporary one, being a descendant of the branch house as she was. Her mother was some cousin of Neji and Hinata's, and until either decided to procreate, the girl would only ever warm the seat for her future head-of-household.

Ino wondered sometimes if that fact bothered her at all.

Admittedly, Ino had experienced a rare moment of self-doubt upon being assigned to the girl's training and care, spending the majority of those first few weeks trying to surreptitiously poke holes in whatever unsaid logic had led to this particular assignment (were all the other teachers taken? Busy on other missions? Had Tsunade simply misspelled the name on the roster?) but in the end, her discomfort was assuaged. Hatsumi's prickly disposition had made the transplant somewhat rough, but inevitably she turned out to be a most startling talent: keen, sharp and a tad wicked, which made for fairly spectacular fireworks when coupled with Rikimaru's rather… wearying antics. And Yuu's mild personality kept the explosions nicely contained.

"Anyway, client info is strictly need-to-know for kids like yourself," Ino explained, trying to sound confident. "Don't worry your pretty little heads over it. We'll know when we see, okay? Probably."

"Probably?" Yuu looked politely suspicious.

Ino cleared her throat. "Right. All I need you guys to look out for are brightly colored briefcases."

"What?" Rikimaru choked down a mouthful. "We're hoping to just bump into him? We're going on good faith and your judgment?"

Eager at the impending fallout, Hatsumi leaned forward. "You say that like it's a bad thing, Riki," she prompted slyly.

"It is! Obviously."

"Tell me, Rikimaru," Ino deadpanned, tapping a menacing staccato on the tabletop. "Do you say everything with the sole intention of pissing me off, or does that just happen?"

He huffed, turning back to his meal.

Yuu was digesting this information slowly. "Strange colors… What color are we looking for in particular, Sensei?"

Ino shrugged elaborately. "Well, I don't really know."

Hatsumi looked a unique blend of amused and thoughtful. "And country affiliation?"

Ino scowled at her. "I can't do that either. Look: it's complicated. Just trust that we'll find him, okay?" She tried to look remotely convincing.

It turned out she didn't need to. At that moment, a soft tapping came from the back of her seat. Ino whirled as the finger first brushed against the wood, hackles raised, reflex-sharp.

"Excuse me," a mousy-looking man inquired. "Am I to believe those are Konoha hitai-ate? Are you Konoha nin?"

Ino sized him up with seasoned swiftness: slight-figured, light haired, both eyes rimmed with red in what was likely weariness. But most importantly: both hands free, no sign of a briefcase, oddly colored or not.

"Are you?" He asked again, with somewhat tepid apprehension.

Ino narrowed her eyes, reaching towards the holster wrapped around her leg. "Depends on who's asking," she answered, expertly turning over the kunai in her right hand.

* * *

/

* * *

"Oh, no, no," the man amended quickly, raising both arms to show there was nothing there. "There's been a misunderstanding. My name is Itoigawa Ginta. I believe associates from you village were supposed to meet me later today."

Rikimaru sized him up suspiciously. Itoigawa extended a nervous hand. "Nice to meet you."

Hatsumi grinned insincerely. "It's a pleasure."

Inwardly cursing Tsunade's lack of appropriate physical descriptors, Ino sighed and motioned to the empty spot at their messy table. Yuu stood to allow their guest an inner seat; it was better to flank your patron on all sides for security reasons. "Please have a seat, Itoigawa-san. My name is Yamanaka Ino and this is Squad Four. We were commissioned to escort you to your destination today."

Yuu sat back down beside their nervous-looking new arrival and asked: "Itoigawa-san, why didn't you just wait at the designated meeting place? And how did you know that we would be here? If you don't my asking."

"No, no," he offered, adjusting his sweater. "Of course not. I had finished my work early at Takigakure and decided to make my way over to the rendez-vous point. But I couldn't find my way through the forest and managed to stumble upon this…" he looked around them, seemingly for the first time. "Refreshment hut."

Ino leaned back. "And your briefcase?"

He sighed heavily. "That's the problem. I had a particularly… nagging sensation of being watched ever since leaving Takigakure. I disposed of my briefcase for fear of drawing attention, but it seems I managed to lose my map of the area in the process."

"And Takigakure? They didn't provide you with an escort to the rendez-vous point?"

"No," he said, shaking his head. "I thought they would have, but no one showed up, so I became rather nervous."

Sighing, Ino raised a hand to her temples. "Wait a minute… you think someone is following you? Itoigawa-san, that's really serious."

"Really?" Rikimaru looked up, mouth full and suddenly intrigued. "Hey, do you have any idea about who'd want to come after you? Old grudges, vendettas and stuff?"

"Oh, it was likely for material pertaining to my line of work."

Oh, right. In their sudden surprise, Ino had nearly forgotten entirely about the initial briefing – if the 'material' in his suitcase was what she thought it was, then he had on his person blueprints worth as many lives as were present in the Hidden Falls. Likely more.

And the idiot had tried to get through the dark forest all by himself.

Yuu looked like the same notion had occurred to him. "Itoigawa-san, where are you headed to now? Where's your next job?"

"Oh, yes," Itoigawa replied. "The Suna. Another hidden village." He looked like he suddenly badly regretted taking on any such contract.

"I'm not sure if we can leave now, Sensei." Yuu pointed at the window. "Night going to fall soon."

Nights in the Fire Country were wickedly cold, despite whatever the name entailed. This side of the mountains, night fell with surprising swiftness, usually bringing with it a superficial layer of light frost as the dampness succumbed to the dropping temperatures. It reverently dusted the land in a swaddle of glittering ice, dismissing the land's cluttered asymmetry. A serene and tranquil mess under the frosty veneer. Come morning, all traces of the night's alter-ego would be wiped entirely away.

Rikimaru gave a dusty scoff. "What's the big deal? We travel at night all the time. It's only cold. All you gotta do is put on more layers to get warm, right? It's not like heat – you can't take your skin off."

Hatsumi rolled her eyes. "I'd think again, genius. Cold makes you sleepy, dulls your senses. And then there's hypothermia, too."

"Ever heard of heat stroke, Hatsumi?"

The original plan had been to meet Itoigawa and then make their way to a nearby town for the night. But here at this remote restaurant, they were miles away from the nearest motel. Riki had a point: _they _had traveled at night many times before, but not with a bumbling client in their care. His safety was their first priority. Ino gave a mental sigh; this was all going to hell a lot earlier than she had thought. And the juvenile bickering didn't help anything.

Okay, fine. Fine. If Itoigawa really did possess those blueprints somewhere, or at least knew where they were stashed, then the lucky team now had at least a few seasoned pursuers on their heels right now. Likely more.

Fabulous.

That settled it. The best available plan was to hightail it to Suna, temperature notwithstanding. They had to get moving soon, before the cold was bad enough to arrest their progress through the dense terrain. Ino glanced at her three students. "Okay, we're going to try for Suna. I need you three to clear the area. You've got ten minutes, then I'm coming out to do it myself."

"'Course," Hatsumi affirmed, standing up to join Yuu, who was already hefting his heavy supply bundle onto his back.

Last of all was Rikimaru, who, for all his usual boisterous disobedience, was still smart enough to listen to his teacher when it _really_ counted. He glanced at Ino with a look of guarded imploration, a half-eaten rice ball still in one hand. "You really want to travel there tonight, Ino-sensei?"

She gave him a half-smile. "Aren't you the one who almost chewed my leg off for stopping?

"Yeah…" He crammed the last bit of food into his mouth, but only in time to see the tail end of his two teammates' swift exit. They were already halfway to the door by the time Rikimaru shuffled messily from his seat.

"Better hurry up, Riki," Hatsumi called back with a sly grin. "Or we'll leave you behind."

* * *

/

* * *

"Look, Itoigawa-san, I don't mean to be rude," Ino said, placing both hands on the table where he could see them. She hoped the kunai she held in one palm would aid in effectively dissuading any lying he was planning to do. "But you need to tell me the truth about this contract you entered into with our village. Were you or were you not being pursued prior to this?"

He looked down at his lap. "I don't know. Not that I was aware of, at least. I simply got the feeling on my way here. I can't explain it all to you… but I really do believe we should get moving as soon as possible."

There was no way their mild-mannered, non-shinobi target had somehow managed to slip out from under the fingers of the escort squad from Takigakure. Something had to have happened to them. Ino was willing to bet they were either incarcerated or dead, and Ino hoped it wasn't the latter.

That settled it, then. They'd get out of there as soon as possible, make it out past the heavy forest and swamp by morning and into the safe(r) lands of Suna. If things were as bad as Ino was starting to think they were, then rest was so not an option it wasn't even funny.

Sliding her kunai back into its holster, Ino swung the rucksack onto her back. "Alright," she said decisively, leaving a handful of coins on the tabletop for the shopkeep. "Let's get out of here." She made her way to the door, brushing aside the curtain and stepping out into the utterly quiet twilight.

And that's when she realized something was wrong.

Her unique little squadron was a lot of things: a little loud-mouthed, a little scatterbrained, a little heavy with the team banter, wickedly efficient at break-ins and prone to sleeping in on Monday mornings. But one thing her team had never, _ever _been was utterly, completely quiet.

Eyes roving around the darkness, Ino drew her kunai back out, crouching low in an attack stance. "Itoigawa-san, get behind me."

"Why? What's wrong?"

If it was what she was thinking, then most likely everything. But she didn't say this, moving towards the line of dark trees with painful caution. A dark shape flashed before her eyes and – there! – in the distance there was one, no: two, silhouettes in the darkness, their cut and sway telling of recent pursuit.

Ino blinked, the moment coming to a deafening standstill when all she could hear was the deafening beat of blood in her ears. _Only two_…Hatsumi. Where was Hatsumi? "Hey!" She yelled, grabbing at the small form nearest to her. "Why are you two alone?"

Rikimaru was holding his left arm at a strange distance from his body, the jut of his elbow looking lopsided – she couldn't tell in the godforsaken dark. "What happened to your…? Riki. Where. Is. Hatsumi?"

A dull thud echoed through the tilted, moist expanse of the hill as Yuu dropped down beside them. "Taken," he explained through raggedy, panting breaths. "They… took her… before we could – "

Damn it, damn it, damn it. A deep breath, two. Ino tried to desperately centre her thoughts.

"Okay." She drew four kunai from her pouch and tossed them at a nearby tree to form a makeshift ladder for her her injured student and their client. "We're – what – three hours from the rendezvous point? No… that's too far. Takigakure. Take to the trees, change your course often. Take Itoigawa with you and wait for me there. If you encounter danger, or think I've been intercepted, just keep going – we're too far for you to make it home. If you can, hop through city centers, stay around people, alright? If anyone is tailing you, don't let them get any of you alone at any cost." She looked at Yuu. "You know where the Ally Entrance is near the Hidden Waterfall?"

He nodded grimly, transferring a handful of strange machinery to his belt before ditching the overweight pack and motioned for a very confused Itoigawa to get onto his back. Too afraid to argue, the man acquiesced, his slender form making the lift relatively easy, despite the child's age. The two looked expectantly at Rikimaru.

"No," he objected, shaking his head in desperation. "What about Hatsumi? We've gotta find –"

"No!" Ino cut him off. "_You _need to listen to exactly what I'm telling you and go _now. _Get out of here!"

Rikimaru recoiled at her sudden outburst like he had been slapped in the face, but nodded curtly, regaining his common sense. In the corner of her eye, Ino saw a figure fleeing in the distance; Yuu had already taken off before them.

That was enough for her – Ino turned in the opposite direction and flung herself down the hill, adrenaline on overdrive and both legs pumping furiously beneath her. Faster. Faster. When the trees crept back onto the land cleared for the snack hut, she took to their upper branches, running a straight path for haste.

That had been a mistake.

One of the very first lessons imparted to young academy trainees were the inherent problems with linear movement: despite increasing speed and power, it was terribly simple to predict, wickedly easy to intercept. Ino's pell-mell chase for the Hyuuga girl and her captors was clearly no exception.

One figure, moving upwards, whirred past her at a hair's breadth – and suddenly her arm was jerked violently behind her back, her path thwarted and momentum began to drag her down, down to the dusty forest floor. She heard something that sounded vaguely like _Stop_, but Ino had never been the greatest listener, and she wasn't going to start now.

_Stupid_, she cursed herself, the dirt floor dangerously near her and nearer with every passing moment. There would be only one moment to make a move, if any, and it was now. The earth came closer, looming in the periphery of her vision; the sensation of falling had skewed her senses and vertigo churned her stomach. But now was no time for nausea. Ino lifted her free arm and drew it back almost simultaneously, furiously blinking away dewdrops from her eyelashes. Chakra gathered in her left hand, pooling in the curves between the knuckles, crackling – electric – against the palm of her hand. Ino wasn't nearly as adept nor as strong as Sakura, but at this proximity it wouldn't make a difference. Closer, closer. Three milliseconds, two.

One. She swung.

In an almost supernatural pre-emption of her move, her assailant's arm shot out bullet-quick a fraction of a split-second later, catching her wrist from below and forcing Ino back-first into the nearest tree. Her shoulder gave a wretched pull on impact. "Will you just _stop _already?" The voice said.

Then they were falling. Faster, faster, coming into painful contact with the ground with unexpected swiftness. Her shoulder bloomed with sudden pain – it seemed to flow through all the nerves in her body like an electric dam burst somewhere in her brain. Mind whirring, Ino made a furious mental scan of ways to avoid imminent capture until, vertigo dispelled, the earth and sky suddenly right themselves and she realized just how _familiar _that voice had been.

Ino looked. A Konoha hitai-ate hung from one of the nin's arms. It couldn't be –

"Shikamaru?"


	4. The Infiltration

**Chapter 4: The Infiltration  
**

* * *

/

* * *

Ino was fairly sure she wasn't the _worst_ teacher in Konoha.

Sure, she regularly skipped team practices for hangovers and spa days, and frequently allotted an almost shameful amount of the granted team budget to useless (?) amenities like room service and in-bathroom hair straighteners. She was rather fond of threatening one third of her squad to bodily harm on a regular basis, and… oh wait. Just today, she had managed to lose one of the Leaf's most precious heirs.

Not the worst teacher in Konoha, huh? Never mind.

"I can't believe this," she groaned aloud. "I can't believe I _lost_ her."

Shikamaru wearily glanced at her outburst, massaging his forearm in a somewhat embittered way. In an attempt to wrench herself out of their double free-fall, Ino had managed to land him with an exceptionally brutal bloomer, already turning an ugly mottled colour beneath his fingers. Still, it was nothing in comparison to her previously dislocated shoulder and currently twisted ankle (which she had bound just shy of blocking circulation and deemed "walkable on". There was no resting while Hatsumi was missing, not for all the swollen ankles in the world.)

"Nobody's lost anyone yet. If the info we've got is correct, then nothing's going to happen to the Hyuuga kid for another week, at least."

"Her name's Hatsumi," Rikimaru interjected, scowling openly at Shikamaru. "Hatsumi."

Yuu, who up until now had been nervously fiddling with his chopsticks, finally woke from his pensive reverie. He looked between the two teachers seated at the table and frowned. "But I don't understand. Why did they want her? Does it have something to do with her family?"

Rikimaru rolled his eyes. "That's so stupid. Her family's all the way back in Konoha. What would _they _have to do with _our _mission?"

"Shut up, you little idiot," Ino snapped, rubbing at her temples. "Of _course_ it might've had something to do with her family… the Hyuugas are, like, the poster family for Konoha. And I lost her. I can't _believe_ this. Poor little Hatsumi's probably being tortured somewhere awful for some evil purpose the likes of which we can't even begin to figure out and it's _totally_ my fault."

There really wasn't anything to say to this, so nobody tried.

Yuu looked a little disturbed at their teacher's violent image, imagining his teammate bound, gagged and weeping. He stifled a sympathetic shudder. Rikimaru, on the other hand, looked highly dubious, trying very hard to recall the last time he had ever seen tough-as-nails Hatsumi quiver in the face of any threat. In fact, he was fairly sure he once saw her cut a hole in her own leg, then suck out a wriggling parasite with her mouth. Yeah, Hatsumi was pretty hardcore.

The silence dragged on for another painful moment, interrupted by the distant pattering of heavy rain; the three remaining members of Team Four entertained very different thoughts on Hatsumi's fate while Shikamaru stared at the door blankly, obviously deep in unspoken thought.

Ino's eyes finally shifted tiredly across the table towards him, but she didn't move her hands away from her face. "Wait a second," she mumbled around her palm. "Remind me _why_ you're here again?"

"Not that you're not grateful," he added without looking at her.

She growled around all ten fingers and narrowed her eyes. "Don't piss me off, Shikamaru."

He gave her a weary look then lowered his bruised arm, reaching deeply into wet pockets before extracting a piece of heavily lacquered parchment that had obviously seen far better days. He tossed it upon the table.

Ino gave it a wary glance. Both sides were covered in some kind of blocky, foreign script; the right margin ragged. She raised an eyebrow. "… Okay. And this is…?"

Reaching over, Yuu picked it up and turned it over several times, scrutinizing the impeccably scrawled lines of images there. "Cool," Rikimaru commented over his shoulder. "It's like a code or something."

"Yeah," affirmed Shikamaru, returning his eyes to the door. "It's a cipher. Not a verified language, not that I know of, but some characters are partially based in the Tekeste Nomadic script. Semaphoric code, from the looks of it." Ino gave him a look of horrified admiration, because none of the strange pictures and squiggly lines even _began_ to reek of anything remotely logical to her. She was thinking more along the lines of "drunken right-handed man's haiku with left hand" or something like that.

"I think," he added, shrugging.

Rikimaru was utterly enraptured, deserting his earlier worry for their lost comrade entirely. The dirty little scoundrel. "So? What does it say, Sensei?" He asked eagerly, turning towards Shikamaru. "Is it like a ransom or something? No… it's like a prophesy, right? That would be _awesome_."

Ino didn't even grace this comment with a look, just picked up her menu and swatted Rikimaru across the back of the head.

"Ow!"

Right. So, weird cipher, missing heir. Um… What? Did this really make sense to _anybody_? Ino glanced surreptitiously at her old teammate one table-width away, where Shikamaru had resumed the previous slow massage of his battered forearm.

"Here," Ino offered, removing both hands from her face to reach into the pack behind her. She tugged out a (surprisingly) clean, dry length of cloth and motioned for him to extend his hand towards her. "Your arm. So, are you going to explain any of this to us? Like, right now?" Because the only other option was screaming and throwing things, but she had learned the hard way that the latter choice rarely made any leeway in any weighty matters whatsoever.

"What?" He asked distractedly, grimacing as she pulled brutally on the bandage.

She shot him an unamused look. "Oh, please, don't act stupid. Nobody believes you anyway. Knowing you, you've got this whole thing figured out already, so hit me with it. God knows it can't get any worse."

Ino wasn't lying. So far, the day possessed all the qualifying traits of being the worst in her life -- despite narrowly escaping certain incarceration and god knew what else (torture? Rape? Murder? Fine, she was getting carried away). Because this was _supposed _to be a calm, easy, two-week reprieve the village and all its associated woes -- mildly mud-logged at the absolute worst. And _not_ involving kidnappings, missing heirs, ciphers, mapmakers and smart-ass classmates whose pants she currently (and unwantedly) had sudden dibs on.

Ino quickly withdrew both hands from Shikamaru's arm. He gave her a puzzled look. "All done," she amended hastily.

Ino returned her fingers to her face; once again her not-so-tiny lottery ball was doing a fabulous job of taking up a significant portion of thoughts much better relocated to matters of search-and-rescue, not to mention wreaking utter havoc with all her firing synapses. It figured, right?

"Well? Out with it."

He sighed, turning to her. "Right, right," he acquiesced, reaching above his head in a languid stretch. The desperate escape and missed night's sleep were beginning to take their toll. "What I know."

Yuu held up the cipher in his hands, assuming it would inevitably be part of their slightly belated briefing.

"Okay. My team had the privilege of learning that the nin that took the Hyuuga girl are unaffiliated with any known shinobi village at the moment, although that –" he pointed at the paper in Yuu's hands. "Says they're trying to change this."

"What? How?" Ino asked at the same time Rikimaru said: "Whoa… you managed to crack it?" She scowled and swatted the menu near him in a threatening motion.

"By offsetting the current state of the treaty with Takigakure, if I read it right."

Yuu blinked, confused. "But why would they take the word of an unaffiliated group over an ally like Konoha?"

Rikimaru scoffed, and in a surprisingly well-educated moment, said: ""Like this is some big surprise. You know what treaties are like."

"And where the hell did you learn that, exactly?" Ino asked, squinting at him suspiciously.

Rikimaru shrugged. "TV."

Anyway, dubious educators aside, it was still true. All Hidden Villages knew that most treaties were nothing more than glorified truces – transient and prone to decimation at the faintest hint of a crack. The Suna was reigning supreme as the current exception, but Ino would trust _that_ about as far as she could throw it.

Yuu blinked, realization dawning on him. "No. Hatsumi and Itoigawa-san—"

"Right," Shikamaru answered, rolling his cramped shoulder. "Plant some undeniable proof that Konoha's broken the treaty and you've got the boat rocking."

"You're kidding," Ino cut in flatly, more and more horrified by the moment. "What exactly were they going to do?"

Shikamaru tapped the paper, which Yuu had placed in the centre of the table. "Says here they were looking to murder some higher-up and frame the Hyuuga girl. Short of putting out her eyes, there's no way they wouldn't track it back to Konoha."

A chair clattered as Rikimaru abruptly stood up. "Her eyes? No way! We can't let them –"

"Shut up!" Ino berated, grasping his wrist and yanking him down beside her. Shikamaru figured the younger boy could now expect a few similar bruises to his own. "So they need Itoigawa for the entry points and Hatsumi to place the blame. God, and we stuck them both in the exact same area at the exact same time. _So_ stupid."

Shikamaru didn't answer, instead leaning back into his chair.

Ino took the appropriate five minutes for unending despair, then rounded up all the sad, half-assed remnants of fighting spirit within her. "Alright, then. Shikamaru, hit us with a plan. I've got to see about getting my fourth member back, or I can else I'll have to start planning for my funeral." At least once Tsunade got to her. Maybe Neji, too.

"And her safety?" Shikamaru reminded her dryly.

She scoffed, leaning back with a slightly proud smile. A missing child was still a missing child, especially if one possessed the much-wanted Konohan heir status, but Ino couldn't miss the bragging opportunity. "Oh, you don't know Hatsumi, then. I'd be more worried about the current arrangement of her kidnappers' internal organs. Or rearrangement, whatever you want to call it."

At this, Shikamaru shot her a sardonic and slightly relieved grin. He knew a lot of girls like that.

* * *

/

* * *

The fortress had looked like this: four wide walls of squat, grey stone arranged in what looked like a depressing prison, the ceiling lower than the level of the surrounding canopy in a feeble snatch at stealth. It was hard to hide a camp of this sort – the area beneath the building had been hastily cleared using what they all assumed was some technique, what with the lack of scorch marks and all, but the earth trembled with the feel of residual chakra.

Rikimaru brushed a hand against the cold stone, gazing upward at the low wall before them. "Stone manipulation jutsu? Whoa…"

"Oh, how fucking perfect," Ino-sensei cursed in a brash whisper. Yuu hadn't seen her bad fall, but her hobbling limp was becoming fairly apparent as the night wore on, and it was starting to make her pissy. Ino-sensei, despite her tendency to bitch and gripe about creature comforts, was always worryingly mum about things that _really _mattered, instead becoming progressively more stubborn and testy as time passed – a trait that made diagnosing her injuries incredibly frustrating.

Shikamaru-sensei had glanced at her pained shuffle once or twice before rolling his eyes, giving Yuu the distinct feeling that he was fairly well acquainted with this attribute already. "Okay, shhh…" Yuu hushed in a rare moment of impatience. "I'm almost there." He shifted his stethoscope against the stone. Truthfully, he had been and still was mighty suspicious that standard lock-picking would serve to get them anywhere at all; most of these element-type jutsu constructions had entries triggered by chakra-recognition techniques, impervious to manual jimmying. And Hatsumi, their resident chakra manipulator extraordinaire, was currently on the wrong side of said wall.

"Nah," Shikamaru-sensei had answered, looking somewhat impressed. "This was hastily erected, look at the way they cleared the area: the energy stamp is way too strong. Probably manual chakra key at the most. This _would_ be a problem, but Ino tells me you guys are good at this kind of thing. My team gave it a shot already, but we couldn't get through."

Ino-sensei gave a nasal scoff. "Right. Your incredibly capable team." Yuu gave an internal wince at her blatant lack of tact, seeing as the abovementioned team was probably dead or severely injured from what they had heard. But Shikamaru-sensei had opted to ignore this, like he did most of her underhanded comments, bringing to light rumors that the two had been on the same genin/chuunin training team years prior. Growing up with Ino-sensei, huh? This was enough to impress anyone.

In any case, the lock was giving now; four tumblers down and about six more to go. Yes, it was a ten pin tumbler, accessed by a chakra molded key in a vibration signature that would usually be impossible to manually mimic. That had been where Rikimaru came in.

"What? Scores! I haven't seen one of these since I broke into the Academy vault –" he exclaimed, sounding like a kid in a candy store. At this, Shikamaru-sensei raised an appreciative eyebrow while Ino-sensei rolled her eyes. The younger boy reached into his pack with his left arm, the dislocated shoulder on his right having been reset moments before by Ino-sensei, and hefted what looked like a broad-toothed comb. "Hey... Yuu, can you hook me up? Um… lessee… Right here."

"Er… Riki, that's a vibration detonation, right? I don't think I've got a strong enough adhesive." Hours prior, Yuu's customary pack had been abandoned in the lam, a few necessary objects hastily shoved into the tool belt around his waist.

"It'll hold," Shikamaru-sensei cut in. "The vibration signature was still within the visible range, so you won't get that much motion." He turned to Yuu. "But you've got about three minutes. Go."

Rikimaru grinned happily, then hit the detonate button.

The silent detonator worked to mimic the vibration signature a chakra key would generally emit while Yuu plied at the internal pins that composed the physical part of the lock. Four down… Five… He listened for the final click as the two pins parted and turned cleanly and held his breath, counting the moments in his head. Three minutes, three minutes. He was nine seconds shy. Would it work while the adhesive held?

Then the detonator gave a final breathy wheeze and the stone began to flake violently away from behind the device, jostling it towards the ground.

Ino-sensei, had been nervously tapping her foot behind them the entire while, had been straining to keep her mouth shut. "Well?"

Then the stone beside the jimmied lock became a little clearer, the molecules parting in response to their nail-biting efforts. One second, two, then the grey matter gave way to empty space and the darkness of the internal building as a door materialized in the centre of the blank rock. Open. They had access!

Ino-sensei breathed a heavy sigh of relief and, in a twilight-zone-esque moment, scooped up her two remaining charges and hugged them gratefully. "_Finally_, thank god. You little bums come in handy every once in a while!"

It only lasted a moment; she let go of them before Rikimaru could begin his squirming protestations. "Alright, you two know where you need to go, right? Rikimaru, I swear to god: if you mess this up, when I see you again – "

Yuu carefully went over their earlier instructions in his head: infiltrate the camp through one of the alternative entrances – another chakra keyed access located on the south side of the premises. From there, chart out the internal area through any overhead system, official or not ("If there isn't one," Ino had explained hurriedly. "Then walk the ceilings. You're ninja, for god's sake."), find as many exits as possible and crack them. Secure multiple escape routes for the entire team. It would be hard, but doable.

Beside him, Rikimaru gave her departing back a scowl. "Whatever, Sensei!" He yelled after her. "Just make sure you've got Hatsumi with you!"

* * *

/

* * *

Ino gave her makeshift tensure bandage a hard tug for good measure, or what she thought was the bandage – it was hard to tell in the godforsaken dark. Denial, it had now been empirically discovered, was the worst pain coping mechanism _ever; _her ankle was throbbing roughly enough to register a five on the Richter scale. Beside her, Shikamaru watched skeptically.

"You know, tying that thing tighter isn't going to make the sprain go away." He mock-considered. "Might make the foot go away, though."

"Shut up," Ino retorted witheringly. The moment they had entered the compound, the two had been plunged into an evil and bitter darkness – which was saying much, seeing as dark had fallen throughout the forest _prior _to their infiltration. She could only hope the boys would be slightly better at seeing where they had to go.

"We can sit for a moment," Shikamaru offered in a rare moment of consideration.

"Nuh-uh," Ino eyed him like he had sprouted a second head. "Not until we've got Hatsumi. But if it weren't for this stupid dark—ARGH!"

"Watch the burlap sack."

"_Late,_ Shikamaru! Just a bit." Gritting her teeth at the not-so-distant throbbing in her ankle, Ino squinted at the sack in question and moved to open it. What she found inside was truly puzzling. "What? Potatoes?"

Shikamaru glanced over her shoulder. "Huh. Potatoes." She heard him move away from her to fumble at a few other things around the room.

Ugh. Infiltrations without blueprints were always destined to be shitty, true, but they could've factored the impenetrable darkness somewhere into their plans. Ino reached back into her pack to grope for a light.

"Damn it. Shikamaru, do you have a lamp on you?"

In a colossal example of bad judgment, Ino had made Rikimaru carry her portable lamp hours prior because there simply hadn't been any room in hers, what with the battery-operated hair straightener and all.

There was probably a moral in here somewhere. But she was damned if she could find it.

"Oh shit," she swore as her weathered village guide slid over her shoulder into the darkness. She heard a dull thud as it hit the floor and reached out to feel for it.

"Here," came Shikamaru's voice, suddenly incredibly near to the back of her neck. "Try not to lose all our supplies yet." He pressed the book into her upper arm.

Ino jumped. "Um…yeah," she affirmed hastily, her current thoughts vacillating frantically between her appalling lack of sense-presence skills and exactly how he had managed to get so close so suddenly. She coughed, inexplicably embarrassed. "So… um, light?"

"Nope," he answered wearily. "No pack, remember?

"Ugh, fabulous. This stupid ankle. This stupid dark."

"Here," he tugged her arm and pressed it against the cool wall for direction and balance. It was a nice gesture. Ino squinted at him, but the darkness obscured everything.

Then a light flickered on in some distant corner of the room.

"Night-access floodlights," Shikamaru noted, almost solely to himself. Ino, half-blinded and disoriented, scowled and squinted at the source of the illumination: a sole floor-lamp had been built right into the stone corner there, revealing the room as fairly massive, empty of all furnishings except for a few haphazardly left bags of wheat and grain. And the now-infamous sack of potatoes.

"Supplies?" Ino murmured, not liking where her thoughts were currently straying. Supplies meant a supply closet. _Food_ supplies meant a – Shit.

A low noise hissed from some hidden grate, followed by a rush of cool air.

The refrigeration had been turned on.

* * *

/

* * *

"Uh-oh," said Yuu, shifting his stethoscope against the cold stone. "What _is _that?"

Rikimaru, nursing a newly-sore shoulder from an injury suffered on his last bathroom break ("I… er, have torch," Yuu offered, just a little late), scowled over at Yuu through the infernal darkness. Overhead, the clouds greedily obscured the moon and any light it had to offer. He hated this stupid season. "Huh? What now?"

"I don't know," stammered Yuu, seeming utterly perplexed by the new occurrence. "I don't think it's my stethoscope…"

"Here, lemme listen." Rikimaru sidled closer and pressed his ear against the listening piece. A low hum droned there, whirring and obviously interfering with the kind of quiet necessary for lock-picking. "Whoa."

Yuu frowned, gesturing at the comb-shaped object beneath the lock. "The vibration detonation, maybe?"

Rikimaru shook his head distractedly. No way. Vibration detonators were specifically designed to _not _emit sounds that would likely interfere with the lock breaking process. And Rikimaru would know: he had made this one himself. "I can take it off, but I'm pretty sure that isn't it." Yuu offered him a chisel from his toolbelt and Rikimaru wedged it between the device and the wall. It came free with a few hard tugs and a grunt, flaked stone tumbling to the ground silently.

Yuu pressed his stethoscope back against the stone.

"Still there?"

He nodded slowly. "Seems like a … refrigeration system, maybe? But Shikamaru-sensei said –" Yuu glanced up at Rikimaru.

Who had stopped paying attention after Yuu's refrigeration diagnosis, instead spending an (extremely) rare moment in deep thought. The source of the noise made no difference, of course, be it a refrigerator or anything else. What mattered was the noise. And the noise meant an unlockable door, which meant a certain ass-kicking with his name on it the moment Ino-sensei and Hatsumi got out of there. _If _Ino-sensei and Hatsumi got out of there.

Right.

Once upon a time (more accurately: right before this mission), Riki had entertained some grand plans of integrating a sound damper into the detonation, but this plan fell flat when he ended up falling asleep the afternoon before their departure on this dumb mission. (Bright and early the next morning, Hatsumi had kindly woken him up with a rock to the window.

Most people did this regularly. Only Hatsumi did it when the window was open.)

Ayway, going back to the detonator. It wouldn't be too hard, Rikimaru considered, rubbing the above-mentioned bump on his head distractedly. He had already worked out a kinda-sorta-maybe plan in his head and the necessary tools weren't too exotic, but he couldn't do anything without some light. He turned to his remaining teammate. "Hey, what have you got on you? Pliers? Adhesive? Anything else? Here, toss me your light."

"Yeah," answered Yuu, removing the toolbelt and handing it over obligingly. Riki looked sufficiently engrossed in whatever plan he had in store, which was entirely fine with him. You maybe wouldn't want Riki in charge of more delicate matters like grocery shopping or babysitting your pet goldfish, but he was ace when it came to gadgetry and the like. Ino-sensei used to say it was the only reason she put up with him as she did (if you could call the frequent abuse tolerance in the first place). Sitting back, Yuu chewed his lip thoughtfully and tried to be as unobtrusive as possible, praying his teammate would finish with godspeed.

A setback meant time, Yuu knew, and time was absolutely of the essence right now.

* * *

/

* * *

"Huh. Guess I must've overlooked this."

Ino rolled her eyes with gusto. If she had both ankles at her behest right now, she would have stomped right over and strangled his stupid, refrigerator-overlooking neck. Seriously. "And now?"

He shrugged in a way that distinctly infuriated her and said: "I don't know. Wait?"

"Wait?"

"Exactly." Shikamaru fingered his pockets for a loose smoke, but without much success. Concluding that he must've left all supplies behind in his wild escape from the tent, he breathed a tired sigh. And with Ino in a bad mood too.

"No!" Said Ino viciously, standing up with surprising ease for someone whose ankle was starting to resemble some sort of flotation device, and grabbed the lapels on his vest. "This is _your_ fault in the first place! _Your _stupid, incredibly flawed plan. Way to be a super-genius, asshole."

Shikamaru sighed apathetically, considering what a really bad time it was to run out of cigarettes. But his characteristic lack of zeal served only to anger his livid comrade more. "_Hello_?!" She stage-whispered, giving him a few brutal shakes for good measure. "Are you even listening to me?!"

It turned out he wasn't, instead suddenly going very still in her grasp. Ino gave a furious huff, sick of not knowing what the hell was going on, and squeezed tighter. "Shikamaru! I can't believe you! Will you just—"

Then a hand shot up in the darkness; Shikamaru wrapped it tightly around her wrist. "Be quiet," he urged her, watching the far wall. "Listen."

Ino slackened her hold, a little taken aback at his strength, and held her breath carefully. There was the dull thud of harsh footsteps in what sounded like an outer hall beyond the stone wall. _A door?_ She mouthed at Shikamaru, who shook his head distractedly. Great. A door might have meant a possible breakaway, but without it they were out of luck. Shikamaru had never been an entry/evacuation specialist and without her team, there was no way Ino could make the break-out alone.

More echoes; the low rumble of voices. They waited in the dark, uncomfortably close; Ino's hand hurt and she distantly wished he would let go, despite the fact that she'd never stoop so low as saying so. From this distance, she could see the dark fan of his lashes against the upper curve of his cheeks, the crinkled fabric of his vest along the collar. Her ankle gave a brutal throb beneath her and she forced her focus back on the commotion outside.

"Combat boots," Ino said softly, realization dawning upon her.

"Sounds like two of them. Non-shinobi," was Shikamaru's whispered diagnosis. "Guards, possibly. But this is the first time we've heard them, so they're not stationed outside of here."

Ino looked at him quizzically. "Why wouldn't they post someone outside of an entry point? Why would they post civilians at all? That doesn't –"

Shikamaru glanced at her, finally letting go of her arm. She rubbed it sullenly. "What time is it?" He asked her.

"I don't know," Ino answered, feeling a little bitter. "It was around nine-thirty when we last saw the boys."

Shikamaru sighed. "They're turning on the refrigeration. They're hoping we'll fall asleep."

"They've _turned _on the refrigeration, Shikamaru. Seriously, is the cold getting to your head? Anyway. They don't know we're here yet, so there must be some way out. We _are_ shinobi, after all." She got up and hobbled to the nearest wall.

"—Who are _both _trapped in a sealed room with refrigeration, and no guards -- or if so, only lightly trained civilians. Meaning that nothing's ever survived long enough to break out of here before, or even pose a threat." He raised a hand to test the temperature. "It's going to get mighty freaking cold in here. Shinobi or not, it doesn't matter. Well, not mostly." Shikamaru moved over to a corner and parked himself there.

Ino shook her head disbelievingly. "You're mighty optimistic. There's got to be something we can– " She traced both hands against the length of the walls (albeit in a very slow, hobbling way) and inspected the ceiling, looking for any indentations that would hint at a hidden grate or air duct.

Shikamaru watched her with express disinterest. "Lower," he answered for her. He pointed to the opposing wall, where tiny rectangular ducts lay side by side. Each contained three open slats, a minimum of two centimeters wide. Looking around, Ino could see they lined all four walls. "I've already checked. The refrigeration comes from those ducts there, so unless you can hack off your pinky finger, fit it through the grate and then reanimate it to get us some help, we're stuck here 'til tomorrow."

Ino limped towards the said ducts; predictably, Shikamaru was right. She was hoping for the presence of some vermin to use the Shinten, but there would be none crawling through the frigid vents. Great. "This is _brilliant_," she huffed, whirling on him. "So what's the plan now, oh Supreme Strategist? Say my prayers and hope I wake up tomorrow?"

Shikamaru was rifling through her pack in an appalling lack of proprietal respect. "I said 'mostly', didn't I?" Withdrawing two wide blankets, he tossed her one. "They just erected this place, remember? So they're getting pretty comfy in assuming no one could get out of here." He gestured at the blanket. "And, you know – fail to prepare… and stuff."

They were two standard grade-issue thermal blankets usually brought on outdoor missions, so customary Ino had forgotten that she had even packed them in the first place. Shikamaru looked at her, nestling in a far corner from the vents. "It's still going to suck, though," he warned, ever the optimist. "Just don't fall asleep. I can't believe I just said that."

Ino sighed deeply, wrapping the blanket around her shoulders, and hobbled over to sit down beside him. It was going to be a long, long night.

* * *

/

* * *


	5. The Long Night

**The Long Night**

* * *

The night started off with a long spell of what was, at least for them, an uncharacteristic quiet.

Ino had opted to play along with the excruciating silence, assuming her companion was busy at work formulating a bad-ass plan for their smooth escape, only to surprise her with it when it was fully formed and ready for action. But as the minutes ticked on and the temperature dropped almost palpably around them with no word from Shikamaru, Ino was starting to think that maybe she had a little too much faith in people.

"So, you…uh… going to hit me with that grand escape plan any minute now, Shika?"

She was greeted by the faint hum of the refrigerator.

"Hey, what are –" Ino looked over to where Konoha's resident over-stated genius was seemingly fast asleep beside her, head nestled sideways in the crook of one arm. Constant vigilance, her ass. "I can't believe this! You were the one droning on about not falling asleep… Get up!"

More silence.

Wait a second. As profoundly untalkative as her companion was notorious for being, these were decidedly special circumstances, and there was no harm in being extra careful. "Hey, Shikamaru?" Ino whispered, tentatively pressing two fingers to his neck for a pulse. No, she realized, rolling her eyes, not dead. His heartbeat was still flickering strongly under the warm skin. Shikamaru's neck really was quite warm, Ino noticed suddenly, almost unfairly so, and some slightly-chilled part of her brain made her rest her hand there for a beat longer than was absolutely necessary. In fact, now that she really thought about it, Shikamaru had a surprisingly nice neck – long and well-boned…

Whoa. Now she was _definitely _going crazy. Horrified with her thoughts, Ino unconsciously pressed down a little harder.

"Not dead," Shikamaru choked out, cracking open an eye. "Just ignoring you."

With lightning quick speed, Ino snapped back her hand and scowled at him, praying her blush wasn't evident in the darkness. "Then, talk," she prompted huffily. "Talking keeps me awake. And you'd better be listening."

The warm body next to her gave a long-suffering sigh. "Alright, then."

"So?"

"So, what?"

Ino rolled her eyes. "Talk. Say something, I don't know, something normal. So I can try and forget about the fact that we're locked in this refrigerated tomb. "

"Fine, fine," he drew himself up a little straighter, tugging the blanket closer under his chin. "Last—uh—Tuesday I had to get up early to test the Cryptography Ops Unit, so I set my alarm clock. I figured it wouldn't work, since it didn't the last time, so I put the alarm in my bathroom. That way, when I went to turn it off, I'd already be halfway to being ready."

Leave it to Shikamaru to figure out a rather complex plan for such a simple task. "And?"

"I was late." He shrugged. "Fell asleep in the bathtub."

"…"

"The end," he deadpanned.

"What? What the hell kind of story was that? I was thinking about something a little more nostalgic and uplifting. And since when exactly does you setting your alarm clock qualify as normal? In all our lives, you've only done it three times!"

He shrugged back in a way that conveyed exactly how troublesome he found the notion.

Ino rolled her eyes at him. She should've seen this coming. "Right, well. Another story. And don't skimp on the upliftingness."

"I've got nothing," replied Shikamaru, reaching both hands behind his head in his standard pose of careless ennui. "Nothing uplifting, at least."

Ino tucked her blanket carefully under one knee, thinking it over. "Oh… hey. Did you know that one of Chouji's girls made it past the chuunin exams in the last set of tests? Her first shot, and she was one of only three successful genin. Chouji was over the moon – the proudest teacher ever." She grinned, despite herself.

Beside her, Shikamaru had closed both eyes, looking for all the world as though he was relaxing under a blue sky on some grassy hilltop and not hideously mal-equipped and trapped in a pitch-black freezer. He said nothing, so Ino went on.

"You were out of town on a mission, so you probably didn't know. But Chouji's going around calling her a younger, female version of–"

"—Me. I do know." Shikamaru didn't crack an eyelid. "I saw Chouji when I got back."

Now this was news to her. Chouji may have stopped by every once in a while but Ino could have counted the number of times she saw Shikamaru this last year on one hand – if not for this mission, the absence of contact would have likely stretched on a lot longer, knowing the two of them – and here she finds out that the rest of her ex-team were merrily cavorting about behind her back all the while. Sure, the boys were the best of friends in a way she had never been with either of them, but that didn't place a phone call or visit completely above and beyond their capabilities. What gave?

"—happened?"

Ino, stuck in thoughts that were becoming progressively angrier, snapped out in time to catch the tail end of Shikamaru's question. "Huh?"

"What happened with you? Your kids didn't test, from what I heard. And judging from what I saw back there, it's definitely not because they're not capable."

"Oh," Ino rolled her eyes. "Riki had this whole stage where he was convinced his life calling was to somehow sabotage the Chuunin testing grounds and become a legend. He got about as far as the front gate. That didn't stop them from banning him, though, which put the whole team on the blacklist for the year."

"Ha." Ino could have sworn she heard a smile in his voice. "And how many bruises did they get for that?"

"I have no idea what you're talking about," she balked in feigned-indignation. "I'm the picture-perfect example of a compassionate teacher. That black eye, sprained finger and wedgie were all his own fault. Or Hatsumi's."

To this, Shikamaru said nothing, resuming his semi-napping state by closing both eyes again and leaning a little further back. The sudden proximity definitely wasn't unwelcome – he was warm and the freezer was undeniably not misnamed, after all. As the moments wore on, Ino's toes were taking on a slightly distressing numbness. Nothing lethal, though. At least not yet.

The two of them shared their two blankets between them, following the age-old rule of doubling body heat to maximize survival probability, and it was working well enough so far. Ino flexed her fingers beneath the fabric, taking careful note of extremities first, and was relieved to find the chill no more than any she would feel on a colder winter night in Konoha. But this definitely didn't mean the temperature wasn't taking its toll, and more than once during the duration of their predominately one-sided conversation, Ino felt herself drift a little into sleep. And each and every time this happened, Shikamaru would cough or shift slightly beside her, jarring her from the potentially dangerous slip. Whether this was intentional wasn't really obvious. Back in their stakeout days, Shikamaru was always kind of a shifty sleeper.

Back in their stakeout days… Ino's heart gave a nostalgic jolt at the thought, a throwback to their old days under Asuma-sensei. The two of them and Chouji huddled out at night while their teacher smoked, wondering when he would give up the coffin nails for the betterment of their team and just find the next decent lodging for a decent a) night's sleep, b) meal and c) grooming appliances.

It _had _been long, Ino realized then. Sure, following Asuma's death, the three had made a few unspoken efforts at see each other more frequently. But things happened – life happened – and sometimes the hours weren't enough to spend on holding things together.

Sadly, that was exactly when they started coming apart.

But just how long it had actually been hadn't occurred to Ino before now; now that she was stuck in such sudden proximity with her childhood friend and teammate and found herself unaccustomed to recent things about him – a poorly-healed scar along the back of one hand, likely mended on the fly during some mission or another, the elongation and hardening of bones that came with adulthood evident in his face. God, he did look older – something she had never really seen before. Looking at him now, Ino supposed he had grown well; the face was a slender one, almost leaning towards a more classically aristocratic look. If you ignored the terrible posture. And that was certainly hard to do with him slumping onto her shoulder.

She was sitting cross-legged, both hands clasped tightly in her lap for warmth. At the beginning, Shikamaru had adopted the same pose, but, being taller, this caused both his knees to jut out from under the blanket. He inevitably settled for tucking them to his chest. It was still cold, though, progressively colder than Ino remembered the minute before and in one sleepy moment, she almost extended her legs over his lap to leech some extra warmth.

Whoa, whoa, whoa.

Startled by the direction in which her thoughts were straying, Ino shook her head roughly in an attempt to clear her thoughts. Awake!, she thought, mentally chanting the word like mantra. Stay awake. There was no way she was going to succumb the same end as a garden vegetable, spooning with one of her oldest friends, after living through 22 solid years of gruelling shinobidom. There will still so many things to see, to do. For example, she was still a virg—

Oh gods. The Ritual. All of a sudden a veritable tsunami of uncomfortable thoughts came rushing at her and Ino scrambled to change the subject of her contemplations out loud. "Ah hah… um… hey! Do you know what I've always wondered about Kakashi-sensei?"

"Huh," replied Shikamaru, sounding like he cared about the gestation periods of platypuses more than he cared about her thoughts regarding Kakashi-sensei.

"Boxers or briefs?" She finished lamely.

"Alright, this conversation is definitely over."

Ino huffed. "Well, I had to say something. I'm looking out for your life here – you were totally falling asleep a minute ago."

Shikamaru didn't answer, sighing instead in a long-suffering way. If there had been light, Ino was sure his breath would have misted in the cold air. When he said: "Boxers," she almost didn't hear him.

"What?"

"I said: boxers." He sat up a little straighter, shifting his semi-reclining position to face towards her. "You and Chouji had that long-running battle that year you couldn't stop thinking about what Kakashi-sensei looked like under his mask. Chouji said boxers. You said briefs. He won."

"He did not win," she scoffed, feigning indignation. "The results were inconclusive."

"Nope, Chouji definitely won." Shikamaru shifted backwards again, resuming his forward-facing stance. "You forced Chouji and I to spy on him in the change room, remember?"

Oh right. Good times.

"But you know, that was only that day though. I've seen him in the change room since and I'm fairly sure he's switches it up."

Ino bit back a laugh. "And you didn't back me up?" She asked in mock indignation. "Whatever happened to trust, caring and support in a comrade?"

Shikamaru scoffed. "In our team? To you? You'd be looking for Asuma." Then he closed his eyes.

Asuma-sensei… that's right. Ino had usually been the default winner of many intra-team quarrels by the sheer strength of her personality, which just helped to load the rare situations in which the boys took a victory. Despite the fact that they never were too overtly smug about it (Chouji being too nice, Shikamaru being too lazy), Ino would fume about it for days, during which time Asuma-sensei would try to placate her with low-level missions to neighboring shopping towns, the two boys grudgingly in tow.

Asuma-sensei…

"I'm cold," Ino huffed, blinking away the sudden tears she could feel crystallizing on her eyelashes. When she turned a little to the side, her ankle gave a sharp throb. Fabulous. Pressing a hand to the injured joint, Ino closed her eyes, concentrating on opening the gates that would emit the healing chakra necessary to mend the torn muscle.

Shikamaru opened an eye. "It's just a sprain, right? I wouldn't waste my energy, if I were you."

"It doesn't matter," retorted Ino. "Gods know we'll probably freeze to death in here anyway. That way, the ankle won't be a hideous size when they drag my frozen corpse out of here with that sack of peas."

She pressed down harder, adding a touch of heat to the healing emanation. Shikamaru sat up and reached out, grabbing at her wrist without cracking an eyelid. "I said: stop. Don't be an idiot and drain yourself now by freaking out. Save some of that chakra for our escape."

"Freaking out?" Ino gaped at him, feeling suddenly, inexplicably angry. "Yes, I am freaking out, because somehow it missed your colossal genius that we're in a freezer! We're _freezing!_"

Shikamaru sighed loudly, dropping her wrist, but still didn't open an eye.

"Are you even listening to me?"

"No."

It was probably for the best that Ino couldn't feel her hands then, because she was pretty sure that it was the only thing to stop her from killing him.

* * *

Yuu wasn't sure of a lot things, but he was pretty certain that any time Rikimaru went quiet somewhere out in the universe, something was going very wrong.

"Uh, Riki?" He asked, looking over his shoulder and losing the alignment of two pins as he did so. Great; yet another fifteen minutes of tedious lock-picking in almost solid darkness wasted. He swiped at his aching eyes.

The unusually silent comrade in question was peering questioningly at the grate above them, a pensive look on his face. This was new. For the most part, their journey had been accompanied by Rikimaru's unending commentary on Yuu's slow progress and the seemingly endless amount of locked doors – it seemed that whomever had designed this makeshift base had paid no attention to facility of movement whatsoever; there were even locked panels located throughout the ventilation system, undoubtedly meant to hinder any lock-picking intruders like themselves.

"Keep going," Rikimaru instructed him, not taking his eyes off the grate above them. "Something's been bothering me."

Yuu glanced upwards, catching the faint hum that been a backdrop to their entire night. "Oh, the refrigeration?"

Earlier that evening, Rikimaru had tried to cobble together a device to overcome the refrigeration system, but to no avail. He _had_ managed to create a magnet for the vibration mimicker (something that came in immensely handy when Yuu's meager supply of adhesive ran out), but the refrigeration system wouldn't give. In the end, Yuu had suggested they ditch the project for lack of time; it didn't seem like the system was alerting anyone to their presence, at least, and the room it was cooling wasn't one they had encountered yet.

"Just leave it," said Yuu, turning back to his task. He plied the pick, simultaneously pushing the tension wrench, and one more pin gave way. "It doesn't matter."

A fumbling noise came from behind him. "Oh, yes it does," answered Riki, rummaging through their pack. "There's no way I'm letting something as simple as this get the best of me."

"Come on Riki, don't waste—"

"Just gimme until you're done there." A light flicked on behind him, and Yuu could hear the snap of the wire clippers. "You'll take forever, anyway."

* * *

Stubbornness, Ino was learning, always, _always_ was its own punishment. She tried to make this lesson as ingrained as possible each and every time her eyes dipped shut.

Shikamaru glanced at her and sighed. "You're falling asleep, aren't you?"

Ino blinked slowly. "No.

He just nodded in an infuriating sort of way.

"And don't say you told me so." She hated it when he was right. Suddenly, it felt like all her limbs were four times heavier than they should've been, the coldness tugging down on them like weights. Sleep would be blissful now, she thought, eyelids slowly drifting shut. She'd just close them for a minute…

Beside her, Shikamaru sighed. "Well, when you spend your chakra on healing a tiny sprain in a sub-zero freezer…"

Awake, she thought. Talk. Stay awake. Something, something…."Hey, Shikamaru?"

He glanced at her.

"Shut up." God, even her synapses were firing slower now, the message taking a moment to cross the distance between her brain and tongue. She closed her eyes.

"Hey," he said, sounding annoyed. "What did I just tell you?"

If Ino had all of her five senses at her behest at that moment, she would have been more than happy to bite back sharply with a retort that might have included his own apparent narcolepsy and the fact that the two were dangerously courting hypothermia, but figured that really wasn't an option right now. Sleep lapping at her eyelids, she gave the sort of groan she greeted her alarm clock with on an early morning.

Shikamaru shifted heavily under her left ear. "Hey." He nudged her. "Ino. Wake up."

Her eyelids gave a flutter; she was falling asleep. She knew as well as he did that doing so would be potentially fatal. "Hey!" He said, louder this time, patting her twice on the cheek. "Don't fall asleep. Get up."

Was his hand warm? She didn't know, truthfully, the pressure on the side of her face felt a little further from the skin than it had a millisecond ago.

Suddenly, blue light flared through her eyelids as Shikamaru fired up a burst of chakra, emitting a warm glow that emanated from both hands. Lack of medical skill prohibited any healing benefits, but the warmth was still brilliant in itself, likely magnified by their frozen surroundings and the sensation of her thawing skin. Shikamaru rubbed both of Ino's hands between his own until she had defrosted sufficiently, heavily leaning into his arm. To her profound dismay, the blessed flow of chakra immediately ceased.

"Ugh," she groaned croakily. "Selfish."

"No," he retorted, not letting go of her arms. "Smart. I'm even lower on chakra reserves than you were, and I'm not wasting it until we're just about to get out of here."

In any other circumstance, Ino would have fired back with some sarcastic retort or another, but this time she figured she should save her breath. Any shinobi knew that chakra fatigue was in another league entirely: it encompassed not only physical tiredness, but was a terrible drain on the mind as well. The dull, unsheltered ache that came from chakra overspend lingered until you managed to create more, permeating down to the bone. Ino closed her eyes, feeling a wave of contentedness wash over her. So tired… It would only be for a second…

"How long's it been?" Came Shikamaru's voice, suddenly and viciously cutting through her dreamy state. With him beside her and rubbing her hands between his, the voice didn't seem nearly as distant as it had a moment ago. But it was still incredibly hard to respond.

Ino lifted a limp wrist, their bundle of hands following, then dropped it. "Check … my watch."

"Hey," he warned, lifting her wrist to examine the timepiece there. "You're not falling asleep again, are you?"

"...Maybe."

"Well, hold on. We're waiting," he replied, placing their bundle of hands under the blanket. "You're fine, nothing critical. Keep talking."

"Waiting… Seriously?" She asked, numbly watching as her breath misted heavily in front of her face. "No secret, awesome, amazing plan that doesn't involve freezing here? "

He let out something that sounded like a laugh, and shook his head. "No."

"So we're going to die."

"Also, no."

"Then you've got a plan?"

"Just waiting." No plan, then. This waiting business was just the expected niceness that came before you witnessed your old family friend and comrade freeze to death beside you in a giant stone refrigerator, her ankle roughly the size of a baby elephant's. Awesome.

"Stop," she mumbled, sluggishly trying to extricate herself from his grasp. Unable to pull both hands completely towards herself, she settled for grabbing onto his lapels. "That hurts."

"Be happy you can feel it," he retorted distractedly. And while she was busy trying to formulate a snappish response, Shikamaru reached up and carefully detached both her hands from his collar, glancing over at the refrigeration gates. "Well, looks like that's our cue."

"Huh?" said Ino dumbly, trying to shake her cold-induced fog away like so many dirty cobwebs. "What cue?"

"The refrigeration's turned off and I don't think it's morning yet. You might want to rescind the threats on your little tech genius when we get back."

Huh? What did Rikimaru… Oh, of course. He _had _been moaning about forgetting to set up his new gadget before their departure, hadn't he? Some remote access kill-switch for any mechanical device. Oh, thought Ino gratefully, bless his smart (and smart-ass) little heart.

"Alright," instructed Shikamaru, getting up stiffly and moving towards the doorway. "You spent your chakra about forty-five minutes ago. It might not be much, but you should've accumulated at least some since then."

It was true. Though she was still slow and foggy, Ino wasn't as close to losing consciousness as she was about a half hour prior, the warm energy running hotly through her veins. Experimentally, she tried flexing a hand; a little sluggish, but all parts connected.

"Warm yourself, but don't overdo it. One or two short bursts of chakra. You'd better be ready to run."

Ino was already on her second burst. "You don't need to tell me," she snapped, feeling better already. "One minute more."

"No time," answered Shikamaru, and at that moment brought his elbow down on the neck of the guard that burst through the door.

* * *

**AN: **Please review, guys!


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